He spent his nights doing food deliveries and his days reading equity research. Then he built the software his mother-in-law never had - so every restaurant could remember its regulars.
The last mile of a restaurant meal is the person carrying the bag. For a stretch of nights in New York, that person was Abhinav Kapur. He was helping out at his mother-in-law's restaurant, ferrying takeout to apartments and offices, and he kept noticing the same thing: he was delivering to the same people, again and again, and the restaurant had no idea who any of them were.
Those were loyal guests. They ordered weekly. They had favorites. And the moment the food left the kitchen, they vanished into a spreadsheet of orders with no names attached. The restaurant remembered the dish. It forgot the diner.
Kapur had spent the better part of a decade in finance before that realization - close enough to the data economy to know that most industries had already been rebuilt around exactly this kind of information. Restaurants, somehow, had not. In 2017 he decided to fix it, and named the company Bikky.
To understand Bikky, you start with Amma, a fine-dining Indian restaurant in New York City run by Kapur's mother-in-law. Her story is the kind founders usually only wish they had. She came to the United States at eighteen, worked a stack of jobs while raising a family, and eventually opened a restaurant with no formal hospitality training. Within two years, the New York Times gave it two stars.
For twenty years she ran it on something close to pure instinct. She knew which guests to thank and which to win back. She knew how to staff a slow Tuesday lunch versus a packed Friday night. She knew her delivery radius by feel. Her tools were a point-of-sale system, a phone, and her own presence in the room six days a week.
The catch was that all of it lived in her head. When she wanted to remember a guest, she handwrote phone numbers off the delivery tablet and exported email lists out of OpenTable by hand. The knowledge was real. It just couldn't travel, couldn't scale, and couldn't survive a night she wasn't there.
Kapur did not arrive from the restaurant world. He graduated from Washington and Lee University in 2008 and went into finance during the least forgiving possible year to do it. He started as an economic assistant at the FDIC, moved into investment banking at Merrill Lynch, and then spent his last stretch on Wall Street as a lead equity analyst at BTIG covering digital commerce.
That last job matters more than it looks. Covering digital commerce meant watching, company by company, how businesses were being remade around customer data - who buys, who returns, what a repeat customer is worth. He learned to read a company by its numbers. Then he walked into a restaurant kitchen and found an entire industry where those numbers existed but nobody could assemble them.
The idea behind Bikky is almost stubbornly simple. Pull a restaurant's data out of every system it already uses - point-of-sale, online ordering, payments, reservations, loyalty, third-party delivery - and stitch it into a single profile for each guest. Who they are. What they order. When they last came in. Whether they're drifting away. The company says it can see roughly 90% of a brand's guests this way.
Kapur is unusually blunt for someone selling software, and his sharpest opinion is aimed at his own category. He tells operators to buy fewer tools, not more, and warns that a dashboard is a starting question rather than an answer. A menu item, in his framing, shouldn't be judged only by how much it sells - but by whether it brings in new customers, brings old ones back, or quietly cannibalizes the dish next to it.
One finding from Bikky's own data has become a favorite of his in interviews: as restaurants pushed entree prices up sharply, they watched new-guest retention slip. His read is that aggressive pricing has a knock-on effect operators rarely trace back to the menu - people simply come back less often. It's the kind of connection that only shows up when you can see the same guest across months instead of one receipt at a time.
Bikky grew out of a single restaurant's problem and now runs underneath a long list of them. The platform reports processing $45 billion in transactions across about 7,000 locations and managing roughly 450 million guest profiles. Brands including Dave's Hot Chicken, Bojangles, Long John Silver's, MOD Pizza, Honeygrow, and City BBQ have used it to make sense of who walks through the door.
The money followed. Backed by investors including Fika Ventures, Equal Ventures, Version One VC, and Gutter, the company has raised more than $18 million in total, capped by an $8.3 million Series A in late 2023 earmarked for product and scale. Kapur co-founded it with John Lucas, the CTO, and Chris Thompson, who leads revenue, and headquartered it on Canal Street in Manhattan - a short walk, in spirit, from the restaurant that started everything.
Strip away the funding numbers and the platform diagrams and Bikky is a bet on a single idea: the best part of a good restaurant is that it remembers you. Your name, your order, your last visit, the fact that you brought your kids. That kind of memory is what turns a transaction into a relationship. It works beautifully at one table and falls apart at seven thousand locations.
Kapur's whole argument is that software can carry that memory when a single owner no longer can. Not to replace the operator's instinct, but to hand it to a brand that has outgrown any one person's ability to hold it. His mission, as he frames it, is to give every restaurant the same analytical view that the largest global companies take for granted.
It's a founder story that runs backwards from the usual script. Most people in tech start with a technology and hunt for a use. He started with a person - a woman who touched every table by day and dug through data by night - and set out to give that instinct somewhere to live.