I travel a lot, including full time for months. Every language change meant the same small ordeal at every meal out.
I'd find a restaurant on Google Maps and get photos from 2016. The menu was a PDF I had to pinch and scroll on my phone, or a photo of a laminated card. A translation app turned a dish I knew into nonsense. And when I craved something specific, I couldn't find it, because most menus aren't indexable. Google can't search a menu it can't read.
Amsterdam made it obvious. English gets you through most of the city, yet menus aren't always in English, even there. Sometimes the English version exists at the restaurant but never makes it online or into the Google Maps listing. One night I wanted a great grilled chicken Caesar salad. Fried chicken salads were everywhere. Grilled ones were nearly impossible to find. I searched, squinted at menus, and ran translations until I was worn out.
I'm not unusual. Across the southern US and the EU, a large share of people speak English or the local language well, but their devices and search habits stay in their native language.
I've spent two decades in growth marketing, so I know what that is: demand with nowhere to go. Restaurants lose those diners and never know they were there. That was me. I gave up, picked another restaurant, and the ones I skipped lost a customer without ever knowing it.
Translating, formatting, and updating menus by hand is a job nobody has time for. So I built Kāāntāā. You upload your menu once. It turns into a fast, searchable, mobile-friendly page in the languages your customers speak, plus a QR code for the table.
I'm Finnish. The word for “to translate” is kääntää. I dropped the umlauts so the name would survive an American keyboard, and Kaantaa was born.
Built globally, with Sisu.
— Mika Lepisto, founder