Flock

Flock checks a restaurant chain's delivery app payouts against its deals, finds the money that went missing, and asks a person before it disputes anything.

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The problem

Noah's NY Bagels runs about 56 stores across California, and a lot of what they sell goes out through DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub, along with their own app. Each of those companies pays Noah's on its own schedule, in its own format, under its own contract, and the rules are different everywhere you look.

  • DoorDash takes a flat cut that depends on which plan the store is on, somewhere between 15 and 30 percent.
  • Grubhub splits its charge into a marketing fee, a separate delivery fee and a processing fee on top.
  • Uber Eats charges one rate for a normal order and a higher one when the customer is an Uber One member. Then there are promotions, like a buy-one-get-one bagel deal where the app agrees to cover half the cost, and refunds, like a customer saying something was missing, which gets charged back to the store at the full price of the item plus tax.

All of this is taken out before the money arrives. What lands in the bank each week is one lump sum with a pile of subtractions hidden inside it, and someone on the finance team has to sit down and reconcile it against what the stores actually sold, against the bank, and against whatever deal was in force that week. If nobody does it properly, the money leaks. Operators who have looked at this closely put the loss at 2.5 to 3% of revenue, and dispute firms that fight these charges for a living win 80 to 90 percent of the time, which tells you how often the charges are gotten wrong in the first place. A real life example is La Patisserie, a family bakery in Cupertino. Their contract with DoorDash said 13 percent commission. DoorDash charged them 30 percent for eight years, and nobody noticed until the uncle who does the family's books spotted it. By then more than $100,000 had gone out the door, and it took a TV news story to get it back.

What Flock does

Flock takes that weekly job off the finance team's desk. It reads the statements, invoices and contracts from each delivery company, and it has connectors for the messier places the real information lives, like a Slack thread where someone agreed to a promo, an email from a DoorDash rep changing the rate, or a CSV someone downloaded from the merchant portal last Tuesday. It matches every order to what the app actually paid for it and checks each deduction against the deal that applied on that day. If a rep changed a rate by email last month, Flock has read that email, and it has also checked whether that rep was allowed to make the change.

Anything that does not add up becomes a finding, written the way an auditor would want to see it. It shows what was expected, what was paid, the gap in dollars, and the line in the contract or the email that proves it. Three agentic judges then look at each finding and vote/debate on whether the money can be recovered. When they agree, Flock drafts the dispute. When they disagree or something looks odd, Flock stops and passes it to a human in the loop with a short note on what it could not settle. Once a dispute is approved, Flock files it on the app's own website and writes the matching journal entry for the books.

What this is worth

Flock puts money back in the restaurant's pocket. La Patisserie's overcharge would have shown up in the first week, not the eighth year. Across an operation the size of Noah's, where 2.5 to 3 percent of delivery revenue is leaking and most of it can be won back, that is two to two and a half cents of every delivery dollar returned to the business, which for a chain doing around $22 million a year would work out to roughly half a million dollars a year saved.

It also gives back time. In our test, a full year of statements for 56 stores, around 1.24 million orders, was reconciled in about two minutes. At an hour per location per week, that same year is close to 3,000 hours of a person's time. The point is not necessarily that a script replaces the finance team. It is that the accountant gets freed up for the hard cases and the disputes worth fighting, while the volume keeps growing and nobody new has to be hired.

And it brings very valuable accountability. Every step Flock takes goes into an audit log that is immutable. It records what each agent did, what it found, who approved or rejected it and why. When an agent tries to skip the human, that attempt is written down too and marked as refused. Months later anyone can open any dollar on that list and see its whole history, with a name next to every decision.

Why a restaurant would pick us

Because, again, we put money back in the restaurant's pocket, and we only really get paid when they do. Flock charges a small flat fee for every transaction it processes, say 10 cents, and a significant fee, say 60 cents, only on a transaction where it actually recovered money. If nothing comes back, the restaurant pays almost nothing. That is a win for both sides, and it is a very easy conversation with a finance director.

Flock gets better on their own

Flock works on its own, and it also improves. When a person makes the same call a few times in a row, Flock proposes a rule in plain words, something like "DoorDash commission above the contract rate, almost always dispute". Once the person approves it, Flock handles those cases itself from then on. The judges also place a bet on every finding, and those bets are scored against what really happened, so a judge that is usually right earns more weight and one that is usually wrong earns less. Over months of human decisions and settled bets, Flock learns when it really needs to call a person and when it does not, and the aim is for that to happen as rarely as possible.

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