Before restaurant discovery became a discipline, it was a smell. At D'Cocco's on Long Island, where Avi Goren worked in high school, pizza advertised itself in the oldest and most persuasive fashion: it escaped into the air. There was a neon sign, a strip mall, the Yellow Pages and the recommendation of somebody whose appetite you trusted. Goren remembers the regular slice, the Sicilian, the buffalo chicken and too many garlic knots. It is a suspiciously complete order for a mere business anecdote, which is why it rings true.
Years later, he would describe that smell as the old version of restaurant discovery. The new version is less fragrant. A guest asks Google for coffee, opens Yelp for dinner, spots a dish on TikTok or requests a family restaurant from an AI assistant. The answer is assembled from hours, menus, location records, photos and reviews scattered across the internet. One stale closing time can strand a family outside a locked door. One neglected menu can make a good kitchen appear to serve last year's lunch.
Goren's company, Marqii, lives among those small facts. It helps hospitality businesses update listings and menus, read and answer reviews, and stay intelligible across more than 80 places where a potential guest might look. This is software for work that is easy to call administrative until it goes wrong. Goren gives it a more demanding name: hospitality.
“If I'm looking for fried chicken in Houston or coffee in New York, I need to be found the right way.”Avi Goren, on digital discovery
The product restaurants did not want
The direct line from pizza counter to software company contains two useful detours. Goren worked in sales at Yelp, then in partnerships at Yext, businesses built around local discovery and public business information. At Yext he was candid with his manager, Bryan Rutcofsky: he planned to start a company. Rutcofsky's reply was equally plain. If the idea was good, call him. He would write the first check.
Goren did start one. The first version of Marqii offered restaurants a way to publish specials. It sounded plausible. Plausible ideas enjoy a splendid life in pitch decks; restaurant dining rooms are less sentimental. Operators were not asking for another promotional chore. Their pain was duller and more urgent. Their hours, menus and other basic facts were wrong all over the web, and correcting them one site at a time consumed hours they did not have.
So the young company kept the customer and discarded the premise. Marqii shifted toward the problem operators had actually described. Founded in 2017 by Goren, Evan Perlmutter and Rutcofsky, it became a system for managing the digital debris created whenever one restaurant must appear consistently in dozens of databases.
The Marqii pivot, in four plates
There is a tidy moral available here about listening to customers. Goren is wary enough of founder certainty to make the point concrete. When Marqii later formed its first customer advisory board, it deliberately mixed independent operators, growing groups and large brands. A three-location restaurant and a 300-location chain do not wake up to identical emergencies. The company's advantage, he argued, came from asking rather than manufacturing a perspective from inside.
The guest experience starts in the car
Goren's most convincing case for digital hospitality requires no technology vocabulary. Imagine a guest checks the hours, drives twenty minutes and finds the restaurant closed. The error may occupy one cell in a database. The disappointment occupies the whole trip home. Accuracy is not housekeeping when another person has arranged an evening around it.
That thought makes the web part of the dining room. Before a host greets anyone, the listing has already announced whether the place is open. The menu has set an expectation. The photographs have suggested an occasion. The review response has shown whether criticism meets a person or a void. By the time a guest touches the door, the restaurant has been speaking for quite a while.
Marqii's growth suggests that operators recognize the burden. In March 2022, the company announced a $4.1 million seed round and said it had grown more than 600 percent since September 2020, serving over 3,000 hospitality businesses. By October 2024 it reported more than 12,000 restaurant partners and another $10 million in funding, bringing its announced total to $20 million. In 2026, the company said its platform was used by more than 15,000 hospitality businesses.
Scale changed the dining room without changing the complaint. Marqii moved beyond listings into synchronized menus, review management and social publishing, while larger restaurant groups brought more locations and more systems to reconcile. By late 2024, a third of its clients operated 30 or more locations. The roster included businesses as different as Levain, P. Terry's, Margaritaville and Big Chicken. Their food shares no organizing principle worth defending. Their information does: a guest should meet the same restaurant whether the encounter happens on a map, a review page or at the counter.
More doors, one recurring problem
Goren marked the 2024 financing with gratitude for the team, customers and investors. Then came a breath: “Inhale. Exhale... now back to work.” He appended a founder's joke that the press release might finally help his parents understand what he does. Capital announcements are usually written as coronations. His sounded more like the pause between lunch and dinner service.
Return the minutes to the people
Restaurant software often arrives bearing the promise of fewer people. Goren makes the opposite case. The purpose of automation, in his telling, is to return people to the work at which they are more useful: cooking, noticing, answering, welcoming. During the pandemic, he put his advice with almost comic simplicity: “Remember to be a human. Ask if they have a couple minutes, if it's still a good time.”
The line exposes the practical streak in his idea of hospitality. It is not chandeliers or theatrical deference. It is respect for somebody else's time and circumstances. Even his favorite personal example is about attention, not grandeur.
After Goren moved to Austin in 2021, the people behind Tso Chinese Takeout & Delivery went from nearby restaurant operators to Marqii partners and friends. A casual conversation about shoes led co-founder Min Choe to send Goren a pair of Jordan 3 Retro “Seoul” sneakers with Tso's socks. Goren called it one of the most thoughtful gifts he had received. The important ingredient was memory.
The story could be filed as founder content, the internet's bottomless genre of heartwarming parcels. It earns its place because it explains Goren's test for the industry. Hospitality people remember an offhand detail and turn it into care. Technology cannot perform that friendship. It can, at best, clear enough clutter for a person to do so.
This helps explain why Goren talks about clients as partners and why his public posts wander cheerfully through particular meals, conference gatherings and restaurant friendships. The business sells consistency at scale; his examples keep returning to singular moments. He appears to understand the paradox. A platform may update 15,000 businesses, but a guest still experiences precisely one locked door, one answered review or one unexpectedly remembered pair of shoes.
“You know your business better than our software ever will.”Avi Goren, explaining Marqii's move toward operator-controlled data
When search stops looking like search
The corner keeps moving. Goren has watched restaurant discovery migrate from Yellow Pages and foot traffic to Google and Yelp, then splinter among social video, influencers, delivery apps and AI assistants. A guest no longer asks only for the nearest burger. The query might request a family place with outdoor seating, a playground and a particular dietary option. An answer engine collects clues, chooses, and may never send the guest to the restaurant's own website.
For Marqii, that makes clear and current data more important, not less. It also raises an awkward question: if a software vendor organizes the information, who controls how the operator can use it? In June 2026, Goren explained why Marqii built a context protocol that lets customers connect their data to AI tools and combine it with other business sources. After years spent making a dashboard, the company was trying to get out of the dashboard's way.
The admission is characteristic. Preset views contain guesses about what a customer wants to know. No two restaurant brands have the same systems, figures or worries. Goren's proposed correction is to let operators ask their own questions of their own information. It is the original pivot in miniature: build, listen, surrender the wrong assumption.
None of this carries the sensory authority of pizza drifting through a parking lot. Digital discovery is mediated, fragmented and vulnerable to confident nonsense. Yet Goren's career makes a case that the technology can still borrow the old shop's manners. Be visible. Say what is true. Answer when addressed. Remember that there is a person on the way.
The restaurant still begins before the door. Only the distance has changed.