Tomasz Felpel, Co-Founder, CEO ; Avri Sainté, Co-Founder, COOIf you’re looking for the best espresso martini downtown, you’ll probably start your search with Google Maps or Yelp, but a restaurant can earn glowing reviews for its ambience, music, service, or food, while the cocktails themselves might be watery, overly sweet, or inconsistent. There’s no way to separate the quality of the drink from everything else. You may find articles touting the “best places in NYC to get a martini”, which primarily consist of paid ad placements and sponsored features. Until now, the only reliable way to find the best espresso martini in New York City was simply through word of mouth. It left drinkers guessing, and guessing is expensive.
That’s where Syp comes in. Syp takes all the scattered, word-of-mouth cocktail knowledge in the city and turns it into real, usable data. Users review the exact cocktail they order, add photos, leave a quick description, and rate it from 1–10, creating the first reliable record of which drinks are actually worth ordering. Powered by the people, Syp gives you the first data-backed list of the best-in-class cocktails in New York City.
“We wanted to turn authentic, everyday conversations about cocktails into searchable, useful, and scalable intelligence citywide,” says Avri Sainté,Co-Founder and COO.
We are mapping global taste preferences through structured inputs, starting with cocktails and later we’ll be extending to other beverages.
Operators invest heavily in talent, training, ingredients, and concept development, but bars and restaurants still face the same challenge drinkers do: there’s hardly any structured data on what people actually enjoy drinking. Beverage directors and bartenders bring deep experience and intuition to their craft, but the industry has no reliable way to measure how specific cocktails truly land with guests.Point-of-sale systems show what sells, but not why. Yelp and Google reviews capture the overall experience, not the drink itself. And while some operators conduct research or hire experts, the insights are broad, costly, and rarely tied to guest-by-guest feedback at the glass level. In a market where operators often invest over $1M to open and 60 percent won’t survive three years, the advantage goes to those with real drink-level insight. Syp delivers exactly that.
From Instinct to Intelligence
Syp transforms the city’s collective taste into a strategic advantage for hospitality teams. By converting real drink-level reviews into clear trends, Syp gives operators visibility into how cocktails perform across flavor, balance, strength, and presentation—insights that complement their expertise and sharpen their decision-making. With this intelligence, teams can refine menus, anticipate shifts in guest preferences, identify emerging flavor patterns, and invest in offerings with the strongest upside. It’s a data layer that strengthens creativity rather than replacing it.
“We are mapping global taste preferences through structured inputs, starting with cocktails, and later we’ll be extending to other beverages,” says Tomasz Felpel,Co-Founder and CEO.
The Founders’ Vision & the Road Ahead
SYP TECHNOLOGIES was born from the combined strengths of its founders. Felpel spent six years in the F&B space with Fortune 500 firms such as DuPont and IFF, leading global business development. His insight into sensory data and ingredient trends shaped Syp’s early concept of “taste meets tech”. Sainté brings a decade of enterprise SaaS experience in global sales, customer success, and software implementation, backed by a family history rooted in hospitality. The pair met at Columbia Business School and later joined the Columbia Startup Lab, where Syp’s early prototypes and launch began.
Today, Syp is proving its model in New York before expanding into Los Angeles, Miami, and beyond. The platform is becoming the data backbone of the beverage industry, mapping taste patterns at scale and setting the foundation for expansion into other beverage verticals, including coffee by 2027. To accelerate this growth, Syp is preparing a $1M seed round to enhance its data engine, expand B2B analytics, and scale into new cities.
By building taste-intelligence infrastructure, not just another review app, Syp is creating a future where flavor is measured, understood, and delivered with precision across beverages and markets worldwide.
