F1 driver Jack Doohan pivots to AI startup Muse, targeting fragmented QSR and F&B operators

Jack Doohan, F1 reserve driver turned AI founder

Jack Doohan is better known as an Alpine Formula One driver who lost his seat six races into the 2025 season. He is now building Muse, an AI data aggregation and orchestration platform aimed at fragmented food and beverage operators in markets most Western SaaS companies have underserved — Brazil, India, Indonesia, the Philippines.

The founding logic came from his first contract, with Oakberry, an acai chain. What he found there shaped the whole thesis. A typical QSR operator runs between 16 and 80 separate software systems, none of which talk to each other. POS, inventory, waste tracking, invoicing — all third-party, all siloed. The employees maintaining that data are often teenagers checking in late and checking out early. The result is fragmented, unreliable proprietary data, and no AI agent can do much with that.

“Each QSR system is using between 16 to 80 different software systems. None of them communicates. All this data is fragmented. No AI agent is going to be strong on proprietary data unless it has access to all of it at one time. We're an underlying layer — almost like a company brain — unifying all their current systems into one aggregated location.”

What Muse actually does

Muse sits underneath existing systems rather than replacing them. Doohan describes it as a "headless" underlying layer — a unified hub that aggregates and orchestrates data from all those disconnected software sources into one location. The pitch to a mid-market QSR operator isn't "switch to us"; it's "let us connect what you already have." With at least three months of clean aggregated data, Muse can then run optimization agents across the stack. For larger operators like Burger King that already have their own agents, Muse functions as the data feed those agents were missing.

That positioning makes it easier to sell. Going in as a replacement is a hard conversation for an operator who gets pitched new software daily. Going in as an invisible connective layer that makes everything else work better is a different conversation.

Why fragmented markets, why now

Doohan's read is that the major chains — McDonald's, Burger King, Restaurant Brands International — are already tech-forward and have internal teams building proprietary agents. But aggregating all their data would require taking parts of their system offline to do it, which makes the problem structurally harder at scale. The real opportunity is the mid-market and smaller operators in high-growth emerging markets, where fragmentation is acute and no one has solved it yet.

The career pivot is genuinely abrupt — Doohan says he had been teaching himself to code since 2019 and had been interested in AI since late 2020, but Muse itself was only founded at the end of December 2025, roughly six months after he was sidelined by Alpine. He is currently a reserve driver for Haas for ten races this year, which leaves him with more time than a full race seat would, though he is clear that getting back in the car depends on factors outside his control.

The company has at least one live enterprise contract and is actively targeting QSR and F&B operators across South America, India, and Southeast Asia.