A flat-fee restaurant POS with an AI general manager built in.
Gaston, an agent with CORTEX memory, watches orders, voids, reservations and supplier prices, and remembers what matters about this restaurant. Flat fee. No processing tax. MELK is pre-revenue: built and demoable, with paid pilots in Denver next. Gaston runs in the cloud today; an on-site Mac mini is on the roadmap.
Independent restaurants run on thin margins and constant turnover.
Four in ten operators said they lost money in 2025. In food service, about one worker in eighteen leaves every month. And the category leader earns most of its revenue from payments, not software.
The POS is the system that watches every transaction these failures pass through, and it does nothing about any of them. It reports them after the fact.
Sources: National Restaurant Association, 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry (Feb 2026). BLS JOLTS, accommodation and food services, 2025 average. Toast Q2 2026 results (Aug 4, 2026).
Toast earns most of its revenue from payments. MELK charges a flat fee.
In Toast’s Q2 2026 results, 82 percent of revenue came from fintech, mostly payments, and 15 percent from subscriptions. Square also charges a processing fee on every card sale.
MELK’s model is flat SaaS with processing as a transparent, optional add-on. The incumbent monetizes a percentage of the flow. We do not.
What one location pays, from published pricing.
Toast’s published plans and rates next to MELK Pro. MELK’s processing add-on is not live yet, so the comparison covers software, hardware and contract terms.
Sources: Toast plans, card rates, hardware and contract length from NerdWallet’s Toast POS review (updated Aug 6, 2026). Mac mini price from apple.com (checked Oct 12, 2026).
Four edges. Memory per restaurant is the one that compounds.
Memory is the library of our minds. A restaurant loses most of its books every time a manager quits. Gaston is built to keep every one, instead of starting over each shift.
Offline today, on site next
Today Gaston runs in the cloud, and the POS queues orders on the device when the internet drops. The roadmap puts Gaston on a Mac mini behind the host stand, so memory and service can stay in the building. That part is a plan, not a shipped feature.
Agentic operations intelligence
Gaston is not six modules. He is one agent with one CORTEX memory of this restaurant, producing six behaviors from the same memory and event stream: Morning Brief, Proactive Watch, Guest Whispering, Supplier Brain, Staff Pulse and Ghost Shift. Toast and Square shipped AI assistants in 2025; ours is built around the memory of one restaurant.
Flat economics, no processing tax
A flat software fee, with processing as an optional add-on. A payments-led POS can add AI, but its revenue still rises with card volume. MELK earns when owners stay because the agent saves them time and margin.
CORTEX compounding memory
Every shift adds to what Gaston knows about this specific building: regulars, suppliers, drift patterns, staff signals, void patterns, holiday rhythms. That memory is earned in live service, so until restaurants run on MELK it is a design, not yet a fact. Ghost Shift, institutional memory that survives turnover, is where owners will feel it first.
Three tiers. Flat fee. Processing optional and transparent.
MELK is not a tax on your revenue. Processing will be optional when it launches, and the product works fully without it.
Starter
Single location, POS and KDS, Gaston Lite (Morning Brief, Proactive Watch, Supplier Brain). For a small owner-operated room.
Pro
Single location, unlimited terminals, full Gaston (all six behaviors), tamper-evident ledger, priority support, and the processing add-on once it launches. The headline plan.
Group
Two to five locations, one memory across the group, shared institutional knowledge. The expansion tier.
Payment processing is not live yet. When it launches it will be an optional add-on with a disclosed rate.
$1.5M pre-seed at $7M pre-money.
SAFE or priced equity. We will syndicate, but a single aligned lead writing $500K plus is operationally easier.
- Round
- $1.5M pre-seed, priced or SAFE
- Valuation
- $7M pre-money, approximately 17.6 percent post-money equity
- Lead
- Single lead at $500K to $1M plus a syndicate
- Governance
- No board seat at this round size. Pro rata rights for the lead.
- Terms
- Standard pre-seed terms
Paid pilots in Denver, on-site hardware, PCI work, owner-to-owner GTM. Target: 10 paid locations with published before-and-after outcomes by month 12. Today MELK is pre-revenue.
That is the milestone we plan to raise a seed round on.
The investor deck, on request.
The current deck covers the product today, the pilot plan and how we measure it, the competitive map, unit economics, the use of funds and the terms. Email labs@aterna.ai and we send it.
Let us build this.
We are running this raise out of ATERNA Labs and prefer a single lead of $500K to $1M plus a small syndicate for the remainder. Book a call and we bring the term sheet, the pilot plan, and the three-year model.
Supporting materials on request: pilot measurement plan, architecture overview (cloud today, on-site roadmap), tamper-evident ledger design, three-year financial model. Investor inquiries: labs@aterna.ai.