Internet trends are simple. Friends and family look into the camera and tell viewers in a slightly offensive tone that they are about to witness the presentation, and that it's better that they're good.
That's what Kendall, the younger sister of Lucious McDaniel IV, did, and after she got aside, her brother pitched his company, Bitesight. You can also bookmark where customers can see what their friends have ordered and try them out. The app plays about how young people are involved in content.
McDaniel posted the video and returned to work. Fifteen minutes later, his sister texted him that their post was going viral. “We had 20,000 views in 15 minutes,” McDaniel told TechCrunch. It got excited, but then the chaos followed, “As more users were able to get, some of the app started to break.”
The engineering team worked round the clock to get Bitesight to work, and McDaniel was going to create Tiktoks about Chaos. He said people loved “authenticity” to see “what happens when your app explodes overnight.”
McDaniel's video presenting this idea has accumulated around 4 million likes and 150,000 likes on Instagram, joining the trend of young entrepreneurs using Tiktok and Instagram reels to acquire traction and trading flow.
McDaniel told TechCrunch that the idea of making this video came after seeing a friend join the same internet trends on his dating app. “It's over a million times and he suggested I try it for a bite.”
McDaniel, 24, said he, like many young people, had noticed that he was eating too many takeaways and couldn't discover new restaurants on the delivery app, so he was ordering from the same three locations. “I hit this wall of a restaurant that looks the same in stock photos.
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025
He kept a spreadsheet of restaurants he found on Instagram and Tiktok, tracked actual reviews and saw what a friend thought about this place. “When I realized that others were doing the exact same thing, my co-founder ZAC and I decided to build something better. It's an app that reflects how you actually discover today's food,” he said.
McDaniel is no stranger to the tech industry. He previously worked for the Atlantic General, but one of his main areas of focus was restaurant technology. He previously founded a payments company called Phly, leading the recruitment software product, and even Angel has invested in several companies, including FinTech Mercury.
He and 25-year-old Schulwolf spent more than a year of bites, including participating in the Y-Combinator's Winter 2024 cohort. Then, in April, we held a limited beta version at New York University. In mid-May, the company launched an early version and did some social media marketing. In June, they made a viral video.
“What made our video stand out was that what we're building resonated,” said McDaniel, CEO of Bitesight (also known as the Chief Diet Director). He added, “It's clear that consumers, especially Gen Z, are ready for something that feels fresh and built for the way they engage.”
After the video, Bitesight temporarily came in second in the App Store's Food and Beverage Category, bypassing Uber Eat, Starbucks and even McDonald's.
McDaniel said the app has also gained over 100,000 new users and is currently only available in New York, but people from other cities have begun a message for a nationwide release. On the restaurant side, McDaniel said everyone from small family-run spots to chain restaurants is reaching out to their partners, and of course, “This is a surge in investor interest from people who see food delivery progress.”
He declined to comment on the scale of future funding transactions.
Of course, Bitesight has a lot of big, rich competition, like Doordash and Uber Eats. However, McDaniel believes that being a startup in the age of AI will be in his profit. For example, while most of their competitors needed hundreds of engineers early on, Bitesight can work with AI tools that perform human work at ten times more cost.
“Using AI, by avoiding large overhead costs and infrastructure costs, we can pass savings to small business owners and customers who need it the most while maintaining a healthy margin,” he said.
What distinguishes Bitesight is that it focuses on food and videos, rather than other categories at the moment.
“We are trying to become the go-to app for a generation who discover everything through social advice and short videos.”