Jack Doohan has always been used to life in the fastest of lanes. Speed has been the factor that has signalled excellence throughout his life.
From a motorsport family, his father Mick Doohan is a five time MotoGP world champion, and close family friend Michael Schumacher, the seven-time Formula 1 world champion, gifted Jack his first go-kart at the age of just three, setting him on the path to Formula 1.
Yet at 23, the speed of Doohan Jnr’s latest venture must have surprised him. The launch and rapid growth of his own Artificial Intelligence startup, Meuze.
“Put simply, Meuze is an AI ‘Company Brain’ built for the Food & Beverage industry,” explains Doohan.
“Meuze pulls data from everything a QSR chain already uses – from POS and invoices to inventory, suppliers and waste systems. Once the core intelligence is set, we plug in targeted modules to fix specific pain points. Meuze also looks at the big picture to forecast what’s coming next.”
Yet Doohan is keen to point out that Meuze is not just another software company.
“We are not a software vendor. We are the intelligence layer. We don’t replace what operators already have. We sit on top of the existing solutions and power your work for you.”
And working it is already, seemingly on turbo boost, with contracted ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) of $9m after just eight weeks.
Meuze’s current footprint is global with more than two thousand locations accumulated through customers such as the popular Brazilian acai superfood brand, Oakberry.
Doohan’s connections and status as a global motor racing star (he won almost everything in karting, Formula 3 and Formula 2 before entering Formula 1 in 2025) have helped, but he acknowledges that nothing would have been possible without his co-founders, lieutenants and friends, William James Zacka, George Allen, and Erik Cupsa.
Doohan and his co-founders have accumulated customers globally including Skinny Louie and are now focusing on the Middle East and North Africa as they look to expand to more than 10,000 locations by the end of the year.
Whilst Doohan balances his dual role as CEO of Meuze and as a reserve Formula 1 driver for the Haas team, Zacka and Allen are the all important engine room.
“If Meuze was a Formula 1 team, then I’m still the driver, the man in the cockpit. William is our team principal and George is the chief engineer. It’s a formidable team,” enthuses Doohan.
Zacka, whose official title is Co-Founder & COO of Meuze, hails from Australia’s Gold Coast. He and Doohan have been childhood friends and this long term friendship has now evolved into one as business partners.
The other part of the triumvirate is Allen, who is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer. Allen went to the same school as Zacka, King’s Canterbury in England, and as teenagers, the two built a multi-million dollar merchandise business for some of the biggest names in pop culture.
Investing and building more successful businesses invariably led to the pair co-founding Pilatus Capital, a venture fund and studio.
It was whilst running the fund and being aware of the impact of AI that they saw the opportunity for Meuze.
“We were looking where AI would have the most impact,” explains Zacka,”and this led us to shifting to the F&B (food and beverage) sector. We knew from the outset that we could tackle fragmentation with aggregation of all these vertical softwares into a unified data layer.
“We also knew that we could have a distinct competitive edge if we moved quickly with unique data extraction without intrusive integration. And there would be high barriers for competitors amidst existing fragmentation,” added Allen.
Doohan, who began the 2025 Formula 1 season in the seat for Alpine Racing, wanted to play a lead role. An active coder in his spare time, he quickly saw the market opportunity. When he controversially and unfairly got replaced after six races of the season, he did not lick his wounds and sit on his hands. Alongside Zacka, Allen, and Cupsa, he began the process of launching Meuze by early 2026.
“I’m a self-taught coder and I’ve always been keen to learn new things away from my racing career,” he said. “Being dropped by Alpine was obviously disappointing but for the first time it gave me the time and head space to build something beyond the track.
“For once something was 100 per cent within my control, but also allowing me to stay race fit and keeping a foot in the sport that I love.
Doohan used his time in 2025 wisely, building Meuze with his team, to make sure that the growth outlook would be net positive from the start with a cash flow positive plan and a sustained marketing focus across not only the MENA region but across Asia and South America.
And Formula 1 has played a huge part in the fast start Meuze has made.
“The F1 network is unlike anything else in business. Fortune 500 CEOs, CIOs, and decision makers are all in one paddock, race after race and my access to these people that make things happen has compounded into serious deal flow for Meuze from day one,” says Doohan. “We aren’t even seeking investment.”
Although his connections have given greater access and opened more doors than a standard start up could ever muster, the utility and value proposition had to be good.
So what is the problem in the F&B industry and what will Meuze actually be solving?
“A typical multi location, QSR (Quick-Service Restaurant) operator is running dozens of disconnected software systems
simultaneously. Their POS doesn’t talk to their supply chain. Their supply chain doesn’t talk to their scheduling. Their distributor data lives elsewhere entirely. The result is a business generating enormous amounts of data with no unified layer sitting across any of it — invisible margin leakage that no individual system can see, let alone fix,” explains Cupsa, the Chief Technology Officer at Meuze and former Amazon engineer.
“Meuze then sits above all of it,” adds Zacka. “We ingest every data signal the business produces — internal operations, supply chain, logistics — and combine it with external intelligence: consumer behaviour, weather, local events, store location context, GLP-1 drug adoption trends, distributor data, and more.
“The output is a live, unified model of how the business runs — what we call the company brain which is at the epicentre of everything. On top of this unified foundation, Meuze builds targeted capability modules — waste and inventory optimisation, demand forecasting, marketing campaign intelligence, expansion planning, and more.
Each module is powered by the same underlying brain, which means insights compound across functions. The brain is the platform. The modules are the product. And the roadmap is as broad as data.
Meuze also has a far reaching network effect.
“Every operator who joins the platform makes the model sharper for every other operator on the platform. A big chain and a fast-growing independent produce different data signals — and together they compound. This is not a feature. It is the business model. The data moat grows with scale in a way that is genuinely difficult to replicate,” summarises Allen.
With a unified core team, Doohan, Zacka and Allen go back many years together as business associates and close friends. The relationship they have built and the partnerships they are building by creating a unified data layer running inside some of the world’s biggest F&B operators is set to revitalise the industry.
