Palona raises $20M in funding to bring AI automation to brick-and-mortar businesses

Palona AI just closed a $20 million early-stage round to push AI deeper into brick-and-mortar businesses. The company, legally Proactive AI Lab Inc., says it is building an operating layer for physical spaces, not just another chatbot.

The round was led by Ardenwood Ventures, with support from CrimsonOx, UpHonest, Turbo, Llama Ventures, Neo, Fusion Fund, Defy and Maynard Webb. Some of the money came through converted simple agreements for future equity. Palona first surfaced in January 2025, when it raised $10 million in seed funding and described itself as a maker of ultra-reliable customer service bots. That was the small version of the story.

What Palona says it has built is a multimodal agentic system that can see, understand and respond to what’s happening inside a business as it happens. Its “capture, understand, act, learn” setup uses vision AI and object detection to track how people, places, objects and processes interact over time. The company says that context lets it decide whether something needs action right away and which workflow should kick in.

Restaurants are the first proving ground. Palona is selling a set of tools called Revenue Expansion, Revenue Intelligence and Operations Intelligence, each backed by autonomous agents. One agent can answer missed calls and push orders into a restaurant’s point-of-sale system. Another handles catering inquiries. A third connects to security cameras to watch for food-safety and cleanliness issues, and can alert a manager if it sees a problem like a customer not being served or a waiter dropping plates.

The pitch is simple enough: physical businesses have been left out of the AI boom because they need systems that can react in real time, not just chat. Founder and CEO Maria Zhang says Palona turns demand, operational context and live signals into actions that improve revenue, quality and execution. The company says it has already been deployed at Cali BBQ, where it claims Father’s Day revenue rose by more than 20% year over year and that catering has become the chain’s most valuable sales channel.