Bites Raised $40 Million to Train Workers in 90-Second Videos. What NYC Restaurants and Shops Can Learn From It

NEW YORK — Every New York restaurant owner knows the problem. The menu changes, a new health procedure arrives, a promotion launches on Friday, and the people who need to know about it are on the floor, not at a desk. A startup built around that problem just raised a lot of money to solve it.

Bites, which describes itself as an “AI-native frontline performance enablement platform,” announced a $40 million Series A on Oct. 29, bringing its total funding to $55 million. PeakSpan Capital led the round, with existing investors Vertex Ventures, Horizon Capital, Rittenhouse Ventures and Lyra Ventures participating. PeakSpan’s Phil Dur and Charlie Reinkemeyer will join the board.

The company’s announcement is datelined Tel Aviv and New York. The Jerusalem Post reported that part of the money will expand the company’s development center in Israel, while the release says the capital will fund U.S. expansion. New York TLV reported that the company identifies New York as its headquarters and that CEO Eran Heffetz is relocating here to build out sales and customer success.

A Restaurateur’s Product

Bites was founded in 2020 by Heffetz, chief operating officer Tal Nagler Almog and Hagai Horovitz, according to CTech. Heffetz came from the restaurant business, and he framed the raise that way.

“Running restaurants taught me that business performance comes down to what people do on the floor, every day, and whether they have the knowledge and support to do it well,” he said in the announcement. “We built Bites to put that support in every frontline employee’s hands.”

The product works like this, per the company:

• Short lessons. Each “Bite” runs up to 90 seconds and pairs a short video with a question, a summary and a discussion.
• No app, no login. Lessons arrive through WhatsApp, SMS, Microsoft Teams, Slack or a simple link.
• Documents in, video out. An “AI Studio” turns a PDF, a standard operating procedure or an idea into a branded training video “in minutes,” and an editing agent revises it when you describe the change.
• Many languages. A single video supports more than 150 languages with one-tap switching.
• Answers on demand. An “Ask-AI” feature answers employee questions in plain language, using only approved company content.

The company says its customers include Unilever, Coca-Cola, Shake Shack, Wynn Resorts, The Venetian and Compass Group, and that it reports 161% net revenue retention, meaning existing customers, in aggregate, spend substantially more over time. Those are company figures, not ones we could independently check.

The Bigger Bet: Training That Shows Up in Sales

The pitch in this round isn’t just training. Bites says it wants to connect training to “measurable sales, service and operational performance”: spot where a team is struggling, push a targeted lesson and see whether results change. New York TLV, reading the company’s materials, noted that some of those system connections are live and the full loop is still under development.

That distinction matters to any buyer. A lesson completed and a number improved are two different things, and plenty can move sales in the same week.

What New York Operators Can Take From This

You don’t need a $40 million platform to borrow the ideas behind it. For a restaurant group, a retail shop or a salon with turnover, the lessons are practical:

Train in the channel your staff already use. In New York, plenty of small teams already run on group texts or WhatsApp. A 60-second phone video from the chef about a new allergen procedure may reach more people than a binder in the office.

Keep it short and check it. Bites’ format pairs every lesson with a question. That’s the cheap version of quality control: you learn who got it, and which shift didn’t.

Translate. New York’s frontline workforce is multilingual. Whatever tool you use, check that critical safety and food-handling instructions are available in the languages your team actually reads.

Review anything AI writes before it goes out. If software turns your SOP into a video, someone who knows the procedure should watch it first. A shortened instruction can drop a step that matters, especially for food safety and workplace safety.

Decide what “working” means in advance. If you’re paying for any training tool, pick the number you expect it to move, such as ticket times, upsell rate, returns or inspection results, before you roll it out.

Why This Round Matters

Frontline software is a crowded field, but this deal says investors still see room in the gap between corporate learning systems and the people who never sit at a computer. The company’s release puts that group at an estimated 2.8 billion workers, about 80% of the global workforce.

For New York, the more immediate signal is a sales and customer-success operation being built here, aimed at the hospitality and retail businesses the city has in abundance. Whether that turns into significant local hiring hasn’t been announced. Watch for job postings, and for whether New York restaurant groups show up on the customer list next.