Standards Don’t Scale. Systems Do.
Today's featured startup is turning franchise operations into repeatable systems that work across locations, teams, and regions
Project Overview
Delightree is a centralized operations platform designed for franchise networks with dozens—or hundreds—of locations spread across different regions.
Its key advantage is completeness. Instead of juggling multiple tools for documentation, training, task management, audits, and reporting, franchise owners get everything in one system—built specifically to maintain consistency at scale.
At the core of the platform is a centralized knowledge hub where franchise operators can store and organize everything that defines how the business should run: brand guidelines, SOPs, process descriptions, training materials, marketing assets, templates, and internal documentation. Built-in search makes this content easy to navigate.
What makes the system especially practical is its AI assistant. Instead of manually digging through documents, users can ask questions in plain language—like “How should this process be set up?” or “What does a new employee need to learn?”—and get answers generated directly from the franchise’s internal knowledge base.
Delightree also includes task management tools that allow franchise owners to roll out changes—such as menu updates or operational adjustments—across all locations at once, then track execution as each location reports back inside the system.
Training is another core pillar. The built-in learning management system ensures that all franchise locations use the same educational materials, automates onboarding and upskilling, and gives owners full visibility into who has completed required courses—especially when new or updated training is introduced.
Beyond day-to-day operations, the platform supports continuous remote audits. Franchise owners can define specific locations and processes to monitor, require regular task confirmations, and collect photo and video evidence to verify compliance—without being physically present.
Standardized forms and checklists help enforce consistent procedures across every location, from opening routines to end-of-day closing, while also enabling structured feedback collection from both employees and customers.
Importantly, these same operational standards can be used not only to manage existing locations but also to control the launch of new ones—ensuring that everything is done in the right order, on the right timeline, and according to brand requirements.
Pricing is customized for each franchise network, depending on the number of locations, contract length, and expected growth.
Founded in 2020, Delightree is now used by more than 300 franchise networks. The company raised its first $3M in seed funding at launch, followed by a $6.6M round in spring 2024—and recently closed another $14M investment round.
What’s the Gist?
First, franchising is massive.
In the US alone, there are roughly 800,000 franchise locations, a number that has remained relatively stable for nearly two decades. Globally, about one in seven businesses operates as a franchise, meaning franchisees account for roughly 15% of all companies worldwide.
Second, this creates a powerful distribution effect. Selling software to a single franchise network can instantly unlock dozens—or hundreds—of end-business customers at once. That’s far more efficient than selling to individual local businesses one by one.
It’s no surprise, then, that multiple startups are targeting franchise operations—but many focus on narrow use cases.
Ezee Assist, for example, raised CAD 1.9M to build an AI assistant that answers questions from current and prospective franchisees using a centralized knowledge base.
Harmonyze initially aimed to build a full-scale AI platform for franchise management and raised $2M last year, but later narrowed its focus to centralized employee coaching across franchise locations.
Against this backdrop, Delightree’s all-in-one approach stands out as a real competitive advantage. By covering documentation, training, task execution, audits, and knowledge sharing in one system, it removes the need to adopt, learn, and pay for multiple disconnected tools.
Another important problem Delightree tackles is knowledge transfer—not just top-down from franchisor to franchisee, but laterally between franchisees themselves.
As the company puts it on LinkedIn:
“One of your franchisees discovers a way to do something more efficiently while improving quality—but other franchisees may never find out. Unless your franchise uses a centralized knowledge base.”
This idea echoes what platforms like WeGrow are doing for large multinational companies with distributed regional offices. WeGrow, which raised €7M last fall, focuses on identifying best practices in local teams and spreading them across the organization—and has already landed clients like Nestlé, LVMH, Mars, Unilever, HP, Diageo, Henkel, and others.
The underlying challenge is the same: scale without losing operational intelligence.
Key Takeaways
The core challenge for any franchise owner is maintaining consistent standards across every location. This problem is so fundamental that McDonald’s famously built its global success on the ability to enforce operational consistency.
But anyone who has tried to do this manually knows how exhausting it is—time-consuming, stressful, and nearly impossible to scale.
Delightree highlights a quote from Atomic Habits:
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
While the original quote refers to habits, the logic applies just as well to operations. With the right system in place, setting, maintaining, and even rapidly changing standards across an entire franchise network becomes far easier than relying on manual control.
When you combine this with the fact that 15% of all businesses worldwide are franchises, it becomes clear that Delightree is addressing a large, structural problem—and its growing investment rounds reflect that.
Given the sheer size of the franchise market, there won’t be just one winning platform. A realistic path forward is to start by solving a single, painful operational problem—and then expand into a full ecosystem as you gain traction, revenue, and insight into how franchises really work.
So if you were launching your own crusade into franchise software—
where would you start first?
Company Info
Delightree
Website: delightree.com
Latest Round: $14M 18.12.2025
Total Funding: $23.6M across 3 rounds