SignalFlare AI Names Robert Peterson Chief Revenue Officer

A New Commercial Leader for a New Pitch

SignalFlare AI has brought on Robert Peterson, a two-decade veteran of restaurant technology, as its new Chief Revenue Officer. He'll run sales, marketing, and partnerships at a company trying to convince restaurant brands that decision intelligence, not just data reporting, is the next thing worth paying for.

The Timing Behind the Hire

The timing isn't incidental. SignalFlare just brought its flagship Navigator product to market, and hiring a commercial leader with Peterson's resume reads as a deliberate pairing of technical ambition with sales muscle built for scale.

The company itself has moved fast since its founding in 2023. It built early credibility by winning Snowflake's Startup Challenge in 2024, beating out a field of more than 1,100 global entries. From there, SignalFlare shifted its identity considerably, moving away from a price optimization tool and toward what it now calls agentic decision intelligence for restaurants. That repositioning culminated in March 2026, when the company unveiled Navigator at the Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Conference's AI Summit. The bet underneath that pivot is straightforward: operators don't just need sharper pricing software, they need a system that can fold external market signals in with their own performance data and tell them what to actually do about it.

A Résumé Built for the Pitch

Peterson arrives with a résumé built for exactly that pitch. Most recently he served as Area Vice President at Oracle Restaurants, where his job was getting digital transaction platforms into restaurant brands across North America. Before that, his path ran through NCR, PAR, and Qu, three very different corners of the restaurant tech stack. That kind of multi-platform exposure tends to produce a particular fluency, not just in selling software but in understanding how disparate data systems actually talk to each other, or fail to.

Peterson's background also includes work on interoperability, open APIs, and data standards, along with a seat on the Restaurant Technology Network (RTN) Vendor Advisory Council. He was named an RTN Industry Champion in 2024 for his role in helping establish industry-defining data standards, credentials that matter quite a bit if SignalFlare's growth plan depends on simplifying integration for operators who already run on a patchwork of systems.

What Navigator Actually Does

The product Peterson now has to sell is ambitious by design. Navigator layers a proprietary contextual data set, pulling from mobile device data, credit card panel data, competitive item pricing, and hyperlocal economic indicators, on top of whatever operational data a client already has. The idea is to explain the parts of a business trend that point-of-sale numbers alone can't account for.

Underneath that sits a semantic layer and ontology, with the platform orchestrating 157 large language and frontier AI models to turn probabilistic outputs into something more dependable: consistent, deterministic answers operators can actually act on. Building that kind of architecture is no small engineering lift, and it signals that SignalFlare has sunk real resources into making its AI outputs reliable rather than simply predictive. Putting someone with Peterson's cross-platform credibility in charge of go-to-market suggests the company is counting on relationships and technical trust, not just product features, to move the needle on adoption.

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What Leadership Had to Say

SignalFlare's leadership was candid about why Peterson was the pick. "Robert knows how to scale technology across the restaurant industry. He's done it many times," said Mike Lukianoff, the company's CEO. "His experience at tech powerhouses NCR, PAR, Qu, and Oracle will accelerate our go-to-market efforts."

Peterson framed his own move in terms of unfinished business. "For two decades, I have helped this industry collect and connect its transaction data to understand what happened in the business," he said. "But that was never enough. Operators always asked, 'What do I do with that insight?' SignalFlare provides the why, and what to do about it. We're creating an entirely new category for restaurants: decision intelligence."

Closing the Gap Between Insight and Action

That last line gets at something a lot of operators have quietly lived with for years: plenty of systems, including some Peterson himself helped build, were good at telling restaurants what already happened. Far fewer could say what to do next.

SignalFlare's wager is that stitching causal explanation and prescriptive guidance onto raw performance data, using its blend of outside market context and a client's own numbers, finally closes that gap. Whether that promise holds up at scale will likely come down to how well Peterson's team can translate it into adoption across brands that have heard plenty of pitches about "insight" before and are rightly cautious about what's next.

A New Commercial Leader for a New Pitch