Two investment firms are betting $300M that restaurants and entertainment venues become the next AI battleground. EMERGING and Promethean Investments opened The Experience Fund on August 14, with room to grow to a $500M hard cap.
The thesis rests on scale and friction. Hospitality employs about 15.7M people in the US with 35-40% turnover, single-digit margins, and almost no legacy technology to defend, a rare combination for AI disruption.
The fund’s distribution edge is built in: EMERGING GP John Davie leads Buyers Edge Platform, which sells to nearly one in three US restaurants through a network of more than 324,000 operator locations.
First-close assets include State of Play, an experiential venue operator identified at roughly $35M value against about $72M in trailing revenue, and TAiV, a venue-media layer running across 4,053 live locations at a 77% gross margin.
Managing partner Mathew Focht argues the winners will not be flashy consumer apps but AI platforms that strip cost, labor friction, and guesswork out of every location.
