Our story
TachyonOwl began as a fix for our own back of house - the inventory, the food-safety paperwork, the “what do we even reorder” guesswork. One of us happens to be a software developer. So we built the tool we couldn't buy - and now we run on it every shift.
Where we come from
TachyonOwl actually grew out of Jancat - a little art brand, then a café, that we built from nothing, beginning with a doodle. We're telling you this because the people behind a tool matter, and because everything we believe about running a small business, we learned by running one.
Mid-lockdown, Ellen turns half a Toronto apartment into an art studio and starts selling stickers of her own designs.
One sticker - a chubby cat for the month of January - stops Kirill in his tracks. “That cat needs its own brand.” Jancat is born.
The art finds 100,000 followers on Instagram. Tired of big city life, we dropped a pin on the map almost at random: St Thomas, Ontario becomes our new home.
We take over a historical building (former bank branch, then art gallery) on Talbot St - and turn it into half art showroom, half bubble-tea café. Though if we are honest - the original spark for the boba part was mostly our own craving for snacks!
We get hungrier: adding ramen and other dishes to the menu. Running the café’s back of house by hand - spreadsheets, sticky notes, guesswork, kept together only thanks to Ellen’s incredible memory - Kirill starts building the tool we couldn’t buy.
It runs our back of house every shift. We keep adding new features and superpowers to it as we ourselves need it. Now we’re opening it up to a few other operators!
“Every feature has to survive a dinner rush here before we say it’s done.”
Customer zero
Jancat is a café in St Thomas, known for its boba and authentic ramen. Thanks to our guests' relentless support for Canadian independent business and their passion for Asian food and boba, we've become a growing business.
And with that come more interesting challenges - keeping up with our order volume, making sure everything's in stock, remembering everyone's pre-orders, being always ready for health inspections, and keeping food waste at bay.
Who's behind it
We're married co-founders and a family business. One of us has run kitchens for years; the other has built software for fifteen. TachyonOwl lives right where those two worlds overlap - and almost no one sits there.
CO-FOUNDER · THE OPERATOR
Ellen spent over a decade in Japan - earning her degree, then managing authentic Japanese restaurants and izakayas - before running kitchens in Canada. Today she's head chef at our café and the artist behind Jancat. She knows what kitchens need because she's spent her career in them.
CO-FOUNDER · THE BUILDER
Kirill is a University of Waterloo computer scientist with 15+ years building software - who also works the line and runs the café's purchasing, inventory and food-safety by hand. TachyonOwl is the tool he got tired of living without.
Why we built the owl
Jancat was never only about us. We've always believed an honest, independent shop should be able to thrive on its own terms.
In a way both Jancat and TachyonOwl are a bet - on the future of independent Canadian businesses sharing what they know and love to make with their community.
We hope that TachyonOwl could be the Jancat of the software world - that it would give a new choice to our fellow neighbours who run their own cafés. A choice that comes with our true belief in your success, from our customer support process all the way to the core of the product technology.
Why we keep going
We're here to give every independent operator the backbone the big players have - so they can run tight, waste less, and grow if they choose to.
Tell us about your operation and join the waitlist. We're hand-onboarding a few select operators as our product launches. We'll come set it up ourselves as part of the limited-time private beta.
Book a setup →