Chicago-based EMERGING and Promethean have jointly launched The Experience Fund (XPR), a $300 million investment vehicle with a $500 million hard cap, co-sponsored 50/50 by the two firms. The fund is designed to back artificial intelligence, automation platforms, IP holdings companies, and data infrastructure built specifically for the restaurant, hospitality, and experiential entertainment sectors.
Why Operators Should Pay Attention
XPR's strategic edge is the market access it brings to portfolio companies. EMERGING is closely tied to Buyers Edge Platform, the food and beverage group that works with nearly one in three U.S. restaurants, giving prospective investees an immediate distribution route to tens of thousands of operators. John Davie serves as both a General Partner of EMERGING and CEO of Buyers Edge Platform. That pipeline of real operating data—covering order patterns, labor costs, and supply-chain performance across a significant share of the U.S. market—gives the fund an unusually grounded lens for evaluating what actually works at the unit level.
Managing Partner Mathew Focht framed the investment thesis around the structural vulnerabilities of foodservice: the restaurant industry is the second-largest private-sector employer in the U.S., accounting for roughly 15.7 million jobs and approximately 10 percent of the workforce, yet it operates on single-digit margins, 35–40 percent annual turnover, and heavily manual processes. "The winners won't be the flashiest consumer app," Focht said. "They'll be the AI platforms that take cost, labor friction and guesswork out of every location—and we can see which ones actually work, because we see the operating data across roughly a third of U.S. restaurants."
Where the Capital Will Flow
XPR will target what the fund describes as the "intelligence layer" of the experience economy—technology that sits beneath consumer-facing brands rather than competing with them. Target categories include order and beverage automation, computer vision, autonomous service, labor optimization, supply-chain intelligence, and gaming intellectual property. EMERGING's existing portfolio offers a preview of the thesis in action: beverage automation platforms Botrista and BrewBird, robot delivery company Serve, and AI platform TaiV sit alongside experiential concepts such as F1 Arcade, Flight Club US, Poolhouse, and Batbox.
Promethean Managing Partner Michael Burt positioned the fund at the intersection of physical entertainment and B2B infrastructure. "Technology is now transforming entertainment the way it already transformed music, film and television," Burt said, describing XPR's targets as businesses delivering both technology-driven consumer experiences and the back-end infrastructure that makes those experiences possible.
The fund formalizes a six-year working relationship between the two firms, pairing EMERGING's origination and operating capabilities with Promethean's more than 20-year track record in consumer, retail, and services private equity across the U.S. and U.K. For operators tracking restaurant technology investment trends or watching beverage automation developments, XPR signals that institutional capital is increasingly betting on back-of-house intelligence over front-of-house branding as the next major value driver in hospitality.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
