Adam grew up in South Africa and did not follow the archetype “Stanford CS to YC” path.

In 2020, during COVID lockdowns, he got completely hooked on Call of Duty: Warzone. He became good enough to start entering cash tournaments—but his family (rightly) wasn’t eager to bankroll a full-time gaming habit.

When the money to enter tournaments ran out, he had two options: stop playing, or find a way to make money online.

He chose the second.

He spun up a Discord server, hosting military simulation events for games like Insurgency: Sandstorm on PlayStation. That small experiment—organizing strangers on the internet around something they care about—was the quiet start of his entrepreneurial life.

Around the same time, he explored making money online: Whop, internet operators, YouTube creators, etc. For the first time, he saw a very concrete alternative to the traditional script of “school → degree → job.”

Up to then, his plan was to become a lawyer and make good money. But the more he saw, the more it became obvious: you could build your own thing on the internet, with no degree and no permission.

At 16, Adam met his first co‑founder, Gurveer Singh, at the gym. They bonded over three things:

They decided they needed to build a business.

The first vehicle: a marketing agency.

They started with what was close: restaurants. Gurveer’s family owned restaurants, which became their initial proving ground. They learned social media management, then Facebook ads. Over roughly two years in high school, they got the agency to a point of decent cash flow—on paper.

In reality, they were reinvesting heavily in the business and in their own skills, with little personal cash to show for it.

At home, things were getting harder. COVID hit, his family ran into serious financial trouble, and they bounced from house to house. By the time Adam reached matriculation, university was effectively off the table financially, even if he’d wanted to go.

He made an executive decision: drop out of high school to focus on the business.

He did it without telling his parents the truth. Instead, he forged a contract from a “job” at a UK company and used that as the cover story:

I’ll be moving to the UK for work within the next year.

Internally, that contract was a forcing function: he had one year to make the marketing agency work.

The agency niche they settled into was generating catering leads for hotels and restaurants. It was a smart angle:

On the surface, the agency worked. They ran strong campaigns, leads flowed, and clients were thrilled—for the first ~60 days.

Then they churned.

The problem wasn’t click‑through rate or cost per lead. It was conversion. The restaurants and hotels didn’t have the sales muscle or systems to close the leads at the volume coming in.

A familiar pattern emerged: Adam and his co‑founder could generate demand, but their clients couldn’t consistently turn that demand into revenue.

That became the core frustration that would eventually lead to Certus AI: if you can’t trust the humans in the loop to pick up the phone, respond, and close, your “marketing” has a hard ceiling.

When AI outbound dialers started gaining mindshare, Adam and Gurveer saw a potential solution. Instead of just handing restaurants leads, what if they could help close them?

Around this time, Adam met Isaac Nichols at the gym.

Isaac was the kind of builder every early‑stage company wants but rarely finds:

Isaac saw what Adam and Gurveer were attempting—using AI agents to call and convert leads—and offered to help.

That’s how the three‑person founding team gelled:

Together, they started working not just on generating restaurant demand, but on the infrastructure that would actually handle that demand when it came in.

Certus AI builds AI phone agents designed to replace the restaurant phone line—24/7.

On the surface, it’s simple:

Under the hood, Certus handles:

The goal is not to create another IVR tree with “Press 1 for X.” The goal is to build something that feels like a reliable, slightly overqualified employee who never gets tired, never misses a call, and never mis‑keys an order.

The Problem

If you’ve called a restaurant at peak time, you already know the problem Certus is solving.

Most restaurants:

The phone line becomes a liability:

For independent operators, the math rarely works out to hire a dedicated phone person, especially when margins are already thin and labor costs are climbing.

The Solution

Certus turns the phone line into infrastructure instead of chaos.

Because the AI agent is fully integrated with the restaurant’s POS, it can:

Instead of relying on the most overwhelmed person in the building to catch every inbound call, restaurants offload that entire surface area to software that scales with demand.

The key distinction: Certus isn’t trying to generate new demand. It’s focused on capturing the demand that’s already there and currently being dropped.

Certus is focused on independent restaurants and small franchise groups (roughly under 20 locations). Think of:

These operators share a few characteristics:

Certus drops into the existing tech stack by:

Over time, if Certus does its job well, the “phone problem” disappears from the operator’s mental load. It becomes a quiet, dependable revenue channel instead of a constant, low‑grade fire.

Selling into restaurants doesn’t look like selling developer tools or enterprise SaaS. Restaurant owners are:

Certus’ GTM reflects that reality.

Paid Ads

Adam’s marketing agency background is a direct asset here.

They run targeted paid campaigns (especially on Meta) that speak in the operator’s language:

They’re not trying to educate the market on some abstract AI concept. They are pressing on a pain every operator already knows and quantifies mentally each weekend.

The unexpectedly strong GTM motion has been resellers, especially consultants and agencies that implement POS systems like Toast.

These partners:

Certus offers:

Without heavy outreach, this channel has already produced some of Certus’ largest customers. It’s an example of smart distribution: go where trust and access already exist.

Coming from the online entrepreneur world, Adam was initially wary of venture capital and accelerators. The default script in that ecosystem is “…bootstrapping, control, and no one tells you what to do.” Even so, they applied to accelerators—including YC.

They applied to YC twice:

What changed wasn’t the story—it was the proof.

They showed that:

Internally, the calculus shifted from “we don’t want VCs” to “bootstrapping this will cap our speed—and someone else will raise and outpace us.”

Given the pace of AI infrastructure and the low defensibility of being “just another phone agent” without scale, they chose speed.

Certus is still early, but the next 12 months are not vague.

The plan:

If there’s a single internal bar they’re optimizing toward, it’s this: Every consecutive call should be something the restaurant can trust—100% of the time.

Spending time with Adam, a few things become obvious quickly:

He’s not a traditional SF founder—and that’s the point. Adam is a South African high school dropout who:

He didn’t come up through FAANG or elite universities. He came up through YouTube, Discord, and selling directly to restaurant owners.

He’s been inside the restaurant funnel for years. Before Certus, Adam and his co‑founders weren’t theorizing about restaurants—they were running lead‑gen for them.

They saw:

Certus is a direct response to that problem. It’s not a random AI idea bolted onto a random vertical. It’s a wedge born from painful, repeat experience.

He blends internet‑native marketing with “boring” infrastructure. Most founders who can market like Adam gravitate toward consumer brands or flashy software.

Adam chose restaurant phone lines.

He’s taking a very unsexy piece of infrastructure and applying:

That combination: deep, unglamorous problem + sharp marketing…is rare.

He’s founder‑market fit for restaurants, not just for AI. Selling into restaurants is hard. It requires:

Adam has lived that in the agency world, then doubled down by building tooling specific to that segment. There’s no “we’ll do restaurants for a while, then pivot to enterprise” subtext. This is his lane.

He Isn’t Trying to Replace Restaurants; He’s Making Their Existing Demand Actually Count

Adam isn’t trying to change how people discover restaurants or eat. He’s not trying to invent a new ordering behavior.

He’s doing something more targeted and practical:

Focusing on the response layer—what happens when people already want to order, call, or book, and the restaurant’s current systems drop the ball.

Certus is designed to be a critical but invisible part of the stack. If it works, operators don’t talk about it much—they just stop losing money to missed calls and bad phone interactions.

YouTube (“Certus Founding Files”): www.youtube.com/@CertusAIFoundingFiles

Founders Files Instagram: instagram.com/founding.files

Adam’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/adam-gamieldien-067605247

Gurveer’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gurveer-singh-35168031b

Isaac’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/isaac-nichols-cpt

After dropping out of high school in South Africa, building a restaurant‑focused marketing agency, and watching clients lose money because no one picked up the phone, YC S25 founder Adam Gamieldien is now building Certus AI: an AI phone agent that replaces the restaurant phone line 24/7 and plugs directly into the POS.

With early traction, a strong reseller channel through POS consultants, and a product squarely aimed at capturing already‑existing demand, Certus is quietly turning one of the most neglected parts of the restaurant stack—the phone—into scalable infrastructure.

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