We’re excited to announce that Apprente has entered into an agreement to be acquired by McDonald’s Corporation.

It’s been an incredible journey. We launched Apprente in 2017 with a mission to build the world’s best voice-based conversational system that delivers a human-level customer service experience. Order taking for drive-thrus at Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) quickly emerged as a fantastic use-case for our proprietary AI technology. We’ve spent the past couple of years tackling this challenging real-world task, and along the way, we developed novel machine learning and speech understanding technologies, culminating in an industry-leading, robust and scalable solution.

From early on, it was clear to us that McDonald’s is truly committed to technology innovation and that it was on a mission to spearhead the QSR industry. In partnership with McDonald’s, we set out to deliver a customer-focused solution, all while building a great team and culture. We were fortunate to have achieved all of these goals. We are particularly excited to be the founding members of a new, integrated, internal group within McDonald’s Global Technology team called McD Tech Labs, which we believe could lead to a growing presence in Silicon Valley, providing the company with optimal support for voice-based technology.

We will be sharing more about our exciting work in the coming months.

Stay tuned!

Onwards and upwards,

Itamar Arel and Moshe Looks