BiteSight

Discovering Food Through Video

Food delivery hasn't changed its core model in years — you open an app, browse static menus, and order. BiteSight is rethinking that experience from the ground up. Built by Lucious McDaniel IV and Zac Schulwolf out of Y Combinator's W24 batch, BiteSight lets users discover restaurants the same way they discover everything else in 2024: by scrolling short-form videos of actual dishes.

The premise is simple but powerful. Instead of reading menu descriptions, users swipe through a feed of dish videos from nearby restaurants. When something looks good, they order it — without ever leaving the app. It's a fundamental shift in how food discovery works, merging the addictive scroll mechanics of TikTok with the logistics infrastructure of a modern food delivery platform.

What They're Building

BiteSight connects users with over 19,500 restaurants across its platform, with more than 2.1 million individual dishes available to discover. The app has earned 1,200+ App Store reviews at a 4.9-star rating — a level of user satisfaction that speaks to how well the video-first format is resonating with both diners and restaurant partners.

The company's viral Juneteenth TikTok campaign generated approximately 4 million likes and sent BiteSight rocketing up the App Store charts, briefly surpassing Uber Eats and Starbucks in the Food & Beverage category to reach the #2 spot. That moment of cultural resonance translated into 100,000+ new users and 714% user growth — all with zero paid marketing spend.

Why It Matters

Backed by Y Combinator, SurgePoint Capital, and angel investors including Airbnb's former COO, BiteSight raised $1.5 million to validate that social-native food discovery is a real market. The $40 billion food delivery industry is overdue for a product that reflects how younger consumers actually behave online. BiteSight's organic growth story — fueled entirely by content virality rather than ad budgets — suggests the company has found a genuine product-market fit that incumbents will struggle to replicate.

About Lucious McDaniel IV & Zac Schulwolf

Lucious McDaniel IV, BiteSight's CEO (self-styled "Chief Eating Officer"), brings an unusual combination of institutional investing experience and early entrepreneurial success to the company. Before founding BiteSight, McDaniel worked as a restaurant tech investor at General Atlantic, giving him a clear view of where the food delivery category was headed — and what it was missing. He had already demonstrated his ability to build commercial products before most people finish college, having grown Phly, a payments startup, to $1 million in annual recurring revenue before the age of 20.

Zac Schulwolf, BiteSight's CTO (or "Chief Tasting Officer"), holds a master's degree in Computer Science and met McDaniel while both were at UT Austin. Schulwolf leads the technical architecture behind the platform's video delivery, recommendation engine, and logistics integrations — the infrastructure required to make scrolling a dish video and ordering it feel effortless at scale.

Together, McDaniel and Schulwolf represent a rare founding pair: one with deep knowledge of where restaurant technology investment flows and what operators actually need, and one with the engineering horsepower to build a consumer product capable of going viral. Their Y Combinator W24 backing adds a layer of world-class operational and fundraising mentorship as they scale into new cities and expand their restaurant network.

YC W24

Accelerator

714%

User Growth

100K+

New Users

$1M ARR

McDaniel at 20

Sources: Public press releases, SEC and state business filings, published interviews, news coverage, and company disclosures.

Discovering Food Through Video

What They're Building

Why It Matters

About Lucious McDaniel IV & Zac Schulwolf

Founder Media Mentions for Lucious McDaniel IV & Zac Schulwolf