The newly launched Sinatra Training App, founded by Adam Laor and Brian Pierce, is the beginning of a mission to revolutionize the hospitality industry via a single platform. Developed out of the idea to utilize software to hasten pick-up lines at restaurants, the business partners quickly realized the endless possibilities of building technology in the hospitality industry for efficiency, savings and more effective training. Sinatra, a single platform of tools for all of the industry, was born. The Sinatra Training App is currently available on iOS and will soon be available on android for all Sinatra customers.
“The mission of Sinatra is to build a single platform for hospitality that is simple, convenient, efficient and cost effective,” says Laor, who helped raise $1.4 million in pre-seed funding for the company’s development and launch. “We realized that hospitality needed left and right brains on the founding teams of hospitality tech companies. Sinatra is a result of that collaboration.”
Laor is a 19-year-old prodigy who successfully founded the herbal supplement brand ReviverBlasts at age 16; developed Sinus Aid, a unique formula that helps alleviate congestion; and helped build Town Pharmacy — one of New York City’s best independent pharmacies — before he was even out of high school.
Pierce is a 20-year veteran of the hospitality industry. With longtime careers at The Phoenician and the Four Seasons Resorts & Hotels, he is a leader in employee relations and a multi-time founder in the food and beverage space. He founded True Salt, the fastest emerging salt brand in the U.S., and WinePhD, the first wine app available via iPhone, which was featured on USA Today’s full-page cover in 2009.
Laor and Pierce met and initially began working together on a ghost kitchen project in Gilbert with the goal of allowing families to pre-order dinner nightly and easily pick it up. During testing, traffic jams were predicted to be an issue, which led to the shutdown of the project. It also sparked the idea of how to hasten pickup and ultimately develop a future platform of tools for all of hospitality. With Laor’s Silicon Valley tech framework details to build the company and Pierce’s insider perspective of the industry, the two founders married their backgrounds of hospitality and tech to create this powerful hardware and software.
The initial launch of the platform is Sinatra Training, which is fully digitized and optimized for mobile, allowing for a highly engaging experience that is optimized for this generation of staff and offers continuous and relevant digital training. The service is a flat fee of $300 per month, regardless of the number of staff or size of the establishment. This is a nominal cost compared to the current industry standard of $5,000 to $6,000 per employee. Upon signing up, the operation will get notification once their training data has been onboarded. The entire team will then have access to download the Sinatra Training App.
With the initial round of fundraising closed, the co-founders have also partnered with Bar & Restaurant Insurance, the largest bar and restaurant underwriter in Arizona; Arizona Liquor Industry Consultants, a spin-out from the Arizona Liquor Board; Southern Glazers Wine & Spirits and Illinois Casualty Companies.
In Q1 2023, the company will launch additional services to the platform, including bottle recognition, which allows for automated digital reordering; safety and security elements via gesture recognition and liquid detection to help prevent slips, trips and falls and detect illegitimate falls; and streamline pickup to make it faster than ever before by syncing prep time of an order with customers’ real-time estimated time of arrival.
