86X Ventures is a hospitality holding company built by people who spent two decades in the business and decided the industry deserved better tools than the ones it had.
Too much of the software built for restaurants gets made without enough input from the people actually running them. The features assume you have time you don't have. The dashboards report numbers nobody on a closing shift cares about. And the price tags assume margins nobody in this industry actually has. The math has never quite worked for the smaller, specific problems — so the tools for those problems never got built, and operators learned to live without.
We spent twenty years living without. As franchisees and franchisors, we ran restaurants across Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida — navigated the operational and regulatory work, watched the same problems show up in every concept and every region. We made spreadsheets to track what software should have tracked. We taped laminated cards to walls because there wasn't a better option. We called other operators at midnight because there was nowhere else to ask.
86X exists because of one observation: the math finally changed. AI makes it possible to ship small, focused, useful tools at a price restaurants can actually pay — tools that would have required eighteen months and a million-dollar engineering team to build five years ago can be shipped now by a small group that knows what to build and why. We also believe the best outcomes come when the people running restaurants and the people building the tools work together — which is why 86X Advisors exists alongside 86X Technology, and why we partner with POS systems, infrastructure providers, and platform companies who know their side of the work better than anyone. None of us solves this alone.
We're building ten verticals of one holding company. Each vertical is its own business. Together they give a brand everything it needs to grow.
That's the whole company. That's the whole reason we're here.
Founder & Chief Vision Officer
A Savannah, Georgia hospitality entrepreneur with about 20 years in restaurants, including multi-unit franchise operations with Five Guys and co-founding the original concepts ZUNZI's and Zunzibar. Chris founded 86X Ventures to help founder-led restaurant brands grow through franchising, operations, technology and capital.
Chief Risk & Compliance Officer
Former VP of loyalty at Mastercard, Jason brings high-level project management certifications and deep experience in risk management and SOC compliance.
86X runs lean on humans and heavy on agents. Each has a name, a scope, and a list of things it won't do without asking.