What was the catalyst for launching Tenyks?
Our founding team all met at the University of Cambridge while studying Artificial Intelligence. We shared a deep interest in AI, but equally, we were commercially minded and set out to build a business with real-world impact. We knew the technology was going to be “big”; we just had to figure out how to harness it into a business idea.
A friend of mine who worked at KFC told me they were looking to implement a system to help them better understand their queue patterns. Initially, we didn't think much of it, but we were wrong. After a dozen conversations with some of the world's leading restaurant brands, we realised their bricks-and-mortar businesses lack effective methods to apply the Peter Drucker mantra of ‘what gets measured gets managed’.
Tell me about the business - what it is, what it aims to achieve, who you work with, how you reach customers and so on?
Our advanced visual AI transforms CCTV video data into business intelligence worth millions to large companies' bottom lines. Only 1% of CCTV data is being monitored, meaning a wealth of commercial insight is waiting to be unlocked. We help operations teams discover previously unseen quality, safety, and security gains, as well as other commercial opportunities, by analysing video feeds in real-time.
Tenyks’ ‘army’ of visual AI agents integrates into companies’ existing CCTV and analyses millions of hours of video data in the cloud, in seconds. We are initially targeting the hospitality sector and the approximately $800 billion global quick-service restaurant (QSR) market; however, our technology has applications across various industries, including retail, education, healthcare, and logistics.
How has the business evolved since its launch?
Tenyks was founded in 2019, and the first iteration of the company focused on the explainability of AI and how to make it safe. We initially built a visual debugging platform, collaborating with Vision AI teams at Fortune 500 companies. Although the product worked very well, it wasn’t growing at the scale and speed we wanted it to. Our mission evolved after we established internal milestones to determine our next course of action; if we didn’t achieve £1 million ARR within 18 months, we were to reevaluate our strategy.
We saw the visual AI opportunity within the services sector and pivoted in a different direction, leveraging CCTV so that clients didn’t need to invest in new hardware or servers. We set ourselves measurable goals and grew from strength to strength – now we analyse 25,000 customer cameras globally. Today, Tenyks operates like a video GPT for cameras. Users can interact with the dashboard and ask questions or provide prompts to obtain the valuable insights they need in the format they require, at speed.
Tell us about the working culture at Tenyks
At Tenyks, we’ve built a culture that deliberately embraces the tension between opposing forces — speed and quality, autonomy and alignment, ambition and humility. We believe that true excellence doesn’t reside at one extreme, but rather emerges from mastering both sides of the equation.
We're a fully remote team, spanning five countries and three continents, but we operate like a tight-knit unit. Daily scrums, bi-weekly shipping cadences, and a relentless focus on outcomes keep us aligned. But so does our humour, openness, and shared long-term vision — because culture isn’t built through policy, it’s built through practice.
Our culture of continuous learning and insatiable curiosity, striking the chord of a hacker mindset utilising unconventional approaches to solve problems quickly, all while maintaining high standards of service for our customers, is what defines us. It’s fast-paced, and we expect a lot, but we want to succeed as both a company and individuals.
We’re not just here to build a company. We’re here to build a company worth belonging to.
How are you funded?
The company has raised more than $4m to date. We are backed by SpeedInvest, Firstminute Capital, LAUNCHub, The University of Cambridge and Y Combinator.
What has been your biggest challenge so far and how have you overcome this?
The biggest challenge every startup faces is building something people truly want. And one of the most challenging parts is finding a way to very rapidly validate. We overcame this by learning our industry – and a niche within it – quickly as a team. Its language and the way it functions became second nature to us. So we built a product to match. We had a three-step process: we found our Ikigai (which is similar to Jim Collins’ ‘Hedgehog concept’, compiled a checklist including potential markets, priorities based on urgency and our go-to-market strategy, and then we tested our assumptions for each market by cultivating a pitch and deck and meeting with 20 customers and industry experts.
How does Tenyks answer an unmet need?
Restaurants today rely on multiple layers of management, mystery shoppers, and external consultants with clipboards and stopwatches to gather data about critical operational KPIs, such as speed of service, labour utilisation, and procedural compliance. Operational visibility is crucial because even seemingly ‘small’ efficiency wins can boost profits and customer loyalty significantly. For example, Restaurant Brands International, the owner of Burger King, found that shaving just one second off service time during peak hours can yield $30,000 extra per restaurant annually.
Tenyks’ visual AI agents are highly versatile and adapt to thousands of potential use cases, providing coordination and invaluable efficiencies for operations teams in large service-based businesses. For instance, it can spot if staff are getting tired and missing breaks, monitor inventory levels, ensure food hygiene processes are being adhered to, track order accuracy, identify areas for optimising store layouts, capture weak spots for customer theft, and analyse who comes into stores and when.
As such, our technology improves the employee and customer experience, all while strengthening a company’s bottom line. Our business intelligence insights can enhance training and enable individuals to perform more effectively in their roles in a safer and more engaging environment. This undoubtedly means a better quality of service, and consequently, more profit.
What’s in store for the future?
Tenyks is betting on a future where visual data becomes as foundational to business decision-making as spreadsheets once were. We see a world overflowing with visual information – in-store cameras, drones, delivery robots, satellites, AR glasses, and media all generating massive volumes of video, we’re approaching a tipping point: a world where visual information is the richest — yet least utilised — source of operational insight.
Tenyks is building the platform that brings together fragmented streams of visual data into a single, searchable intelligence layer. A “Visual Lakehouse” for the physical world.
For brands managing thousands of locations, even a few seconds shaved off drive-thru service times can result in improved employee and customer satisfaction, as well as millions in incremental revenue. Video already sees what matters — queue lengths, food prep errors, customer theft — but until now, no one’s been able to extract that insight at scale.
But what’s coming next takes that even further.
Imagine this: a restaurant chain sees a wave of negative reviews on Google or TripAdvisor. Tenyks plugs those reviews into GPT-style language models to extract themes — long wait times, inaccurate orders, unfriendly staff. Then, with a single prompt, it deploys an army of Visual Agents to search through tens of thousands of hours of video to diagnose exactly when, where, and why things went wrong — and how to fix them.
And just like app stores unlocked a global developer economy, Tenyks envisions an Agent Economy, where businesses and developers can build and share their own custom Visual Agents on the platform. Visual Agents become modular tools: fine-tuned for niche use cases, deployed at scale, and composable based on local context.
Tenyks is building the operating system for the visual world.
What one piece of advice would you give other founders or future founders?
“It will be ok”. I’ve seen founders pull through seemingly impossible situations. I went for a walk with a friend of mine who didn’t know how he would make payroll next month. Six months later, he was messaging me with the insane traction he was getting. I’ve seen people laying off everyone but the founders waited nine months for FDA approval, then they raised £4m, and re-hired the entire team. There is always a move you can make. Just keep playing, and it will be ok.
And finally, a more personal question! What’s your daily routine and the rules you’re living by at the moment?
When we started Tenyks, I used to have a pre-scripted routine for every 15 minutes, with a sophisticated morning and nighttime routine, that I followed meticulously. And I wish I could say I still regularly do my nightly mindfulness practice, listening to Mark Williams as I fall asleep, but the reality is that I go through all messaging apps just in case something needs to happen before bedtime. Tenyks is growing and constantly innovating, and we’re at that stage of the journey, which Ben Horowitz describes as the “Struggle”.
I’m living by the rules of triaging and prioritising. What needs to be done? What needs to be done right now? What needs to be done right now by me? Or other members on my team? However, my most important tenet is going to sleep knowing that I’ve done my best so that I can repeat it all the next day.
Dr Botty Dimanov is the CEO and Co-founder of Tenyks.
