About Us

Our Story

It began with a problem

Craftable started the way all great technology companies should: with a real problem and the people who lived it.

Co-founders Sam and Max Zats grew up in their family’s restaurants, where they experienced both the joy of hospitality and the relentless grind of back-office inefficiency. Sam went on to study at Berkeley and Stanford before joining McKinsey, and everywhere he looked he saw the same issue: outdated systems that weren’t just inconvenient—they were holding operators back.

Sam’s longtime friend, Jay Villafana, knew the industry inside and out. As bar manager at San Francisco’s celebrated The Slanted Door, he set the standard for hospitality at the front of the house. But behind the scenes, it was a different story—manual spreadsheets, missing invoices, and crossed fingers. Hearing Jay’s frustrations made the problem impossible for Sam to ignore.

The Approach

Built in partnership with our customers

Sam, Max, and Jay knew Craftable couldn’t be built in isolation. They set out to confront hospitality’s toughest challenges head-on, designing solutions that would stand up to real-world complexity.

They built it in collaboration with some of the most exacting culinary minds in the world — operators like José Andrés and his team — whose standards for excellence are non-negotiable.

Every feature was developed in response to a real need — not to check a box, but to solve a problem with the same precision and pride that great hospitality demands. That’s why the platform is as robust as it is: it wasn’t designed for the average use case. It was shaped by teams who run world-class kitchens and won’t settle for “good enough.”

They studied over 300 bar management spreadsheets, embedded in kitchens and back offices, and listened closely to the daily friction points that traditional software ignored.

Where we are today

Simplifying the Complex, Amplifying the Craft

Twelve years later, we’re proud to support more than 80,000 hospitality professionals — helping manage over 4 million invoices each year and over $5 billion in purchasing.

We never set out to become a platform. We set out to solve a problem — and in doing so, discovered that thousands of others were facing the same challenges.

From back-office chaos to smooth, connected systems, Craftable now supports every part of the operation — food and beverage, supplies, labor, and finance — with tools built to be as intuitive as they are powerful. Tools that teams trust, from the prep station to the boardroom.

And as the industry evolves, so will we — alongside the chefs, operators, and finance teams who continue to push the craft forward.

Because no matter how far we grow, our mission stays the same:
To remove the complexity, so hospitality teams can focus on what they do best — creating memorable moments that bring guests back again and again.