Prosus backs Emilia AI's camera-based restaurant analytics with $1.5M pre-seed
Prosus put $1M into the $1.5M pre-seed, which Emilia AI will use to develop its platform and expand in Brazil, its main market.
Emilia AI, a Colombian-founded startup that turns existing restaurant security cameras into an operations-analytics tool, has raised a $1.5M pre-seed round led by Prosus. The Dutch-listed investor contributed $1M of the total, according to the announcement.
The company was founded in 2024 by Colombian entrepreneurs Andrés Cajiao and Sebastian Rojo. Its platform uses AI to analyze restaurant operations through the security cameras venues already have installed, combining that video with point-of-sale data to surface sales opportunities, fraud and operational issues in real time. In practice, that means a restaurant's existing hardware stack becomes a monitoring layer rather than requiring new sensors.
Emilia AI will spend the money developing the platform and expanding in Brazil, which it describes as its main market, before moving into other Latin American countries. The sequencing is notable: rather than starting with a broad regional rollout, the startup is concentrating first on the market where it has already run its earliest commercial tests.
Those tests offer the clearest picture of the unit economics the company is pitching. Emilia AI ran a pilot with Alife Nino, an operator with more than 100 restaurants in Brazil. According to Emilia AI, the pilot generated about $300 in additional monthly revenue per table at a cost of $10 per table. The company also ran a pilot with Jin Jin, which is expanding the platform to more than 77 locations.
If those figures hold at scale, they point to a business model built on a wide gap between incremental revenue and per-location cost. The caveat is that the numbers come from the company itself and from small, early deployments, so they are a signal of promise rather than proof of repeatable economics across a large estate. Restaurant margins are thin and technology budgets are usually scrutinized closely, which makes the cost-per-table line as important as the revenue one.
The approach also sidesteps a common obstacle in computer vision: hardware. By relying on cameras that restaurants already operate, Emilia AI avoids the installation and capital costs that can slow adoption in an industry where sites are numerous but individually small. Whether that translates into faster rollouts across Brazil's fragmented restaurant sector is the question the new capital is meant to answer.
For Prosus, the bet is a small one at this stage — a pre-seed check into a two-year-old company with two named pilot customers. But it places the investor inside an application layer for AI in physical retail and food service, a category where data is abundant and measurable returns are relatively easy to track.
The round was announced on September 15, 2026. Emilia AI has not disclosed a valuation or headcount.