Bhavuk Kaul

Bhavuk Kaul is co-founder of Ottimate, an accounts payable automation company in San Francisco, California, that began in 2014 as Plate IQ. He led the company as chief executive officer from 2014 until 2021 and then moved into the role of president.

Finding the Problem in a Restaurant Back Office

Kaul and co-founder Ram Jayaraman found their first problem by sitting inside restaurants. "At the restaurant I was talking to, they have about 10 locations, and they have about 300 paper invoices a week," Kaul told PYMNTS in 2015, adding that food made up about a third of that restaurant's costs and its prices moved with the seasons. All of that paper also had to be keyed into accounting software by hand.

Launching Plate IQ Through Y Combinator

Plate IQ let restaurant staff photograph an invoice with a phone, then used optical character recognition and machine learning to turn each line into searchable data. The company went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2015, and at the time it had about 65 customers, most of them in San Francisco.

Handing the CEO Role to Barrett Boston

By late 2021 Plate IQ processed more than 50,000 invoices a day for more than 20,000 customers across restaurants, hotels, country clubs, and accounting services. That year the company named Barrett Boston, a former chief revenue officer of TriNet, as chief executive, and Kaul became president to provide continuity and strategic guidance, according to an FTV Capital announcement. He and Jayaraman remained on the board, and the company later renamed itself Ottimate as it sold beyond restaurants.