The operator who taught software to run a restaurant
Most founders read about a problem before they solve it. Conor Sheridan cooked his way through one. He left quantitative trading, opened a fried chicken shop in Dublin, drowned in rotas and stock counts like every operator before him, and then built the software he wished had existed. That software is Nory, and investors have now put roughly $62.6m behind it.
Sheridan's route into technology did not run through a computer science lab. It ran through a finance career and a kitchen. Before hospitality, he worked as a quantitative trader and investment strategist, moving through consultancy and fund management. By his own description, he went from that world to frying chicken. It sounds like a downgrade. It was closer to a research project.
In 2017 he stepped away from finance and, soon after, co-founded Mad Egg, a free-range fried chicken chain that opened on Camden Street in Dublin and grew into one of Ireland's fastest-moving independent restaurant groups. Running it, he ran headfirst into the daily grind that every restaurant operator knows: forecasting how much to buy, staffing the right number of people, chasing suppliers, reconciling payroll, and trying to work out where the margin actually leaked. The tools on the market gave him dashboards. What he wanted were answers.
The future of hospitality isn't robots or gimmicks. It's AI that makes restaurants smarter, leaner and more profitable.
Building the thing he needed
That frustration became a product thesis. Restaurant operators, Sheridan argued, were overwhelmed by data and starved of direction. Technology should tell them what to do next, not just report what already happened. In 2021 he founded the company that became Nory (it launched under the earlier name Skueeze), an AI-native operating system for hospitality businesses. The idea was to pull the scattered pieces of restaurant operations into one system that learns a specific business and acts as a co-pilot to the team running it.
In practice that means Nory reaches across the parts of a restaurant that usually live in separate spreadsheets and apps: inventory and stock control, workforce management and rota planning, payroll, procurement, finance, business intelligence and digital guest engagement. The company says the platform can save restaurateurs on the order of 100 hours of administrative work a month, time that operators would rather spend on food and customers than on reconciliation.
At a time when hospitality is under pressure, we are putting restaurants back in control of their profitability and their destiny.
Money follows the operator
Nory's funding history reads like a company that kept clearing its own bar. It started with a small pre-seed round in 2021, backed by Playfair Capital and Cavalry Ventures. A seed round followed. In 2024 came a $16m Series A led by Accel. Then, in September 2025, Nory raised a $37m Series B led by Stockholm's Kinnevik, lifting total funding to roughly $62.6m. That is the kind of trajectory that tends to attract attention, and the client roster reflects it: hospitality names including the Jamie Oliver Group, the Azzurri Group and Black Sheep Coffee have signed on.
Sheridan is candid about one piece of advice he keeps returning to: bootstrap your first startup. Feeling every euro of margin at Mad Egg, he says, is exactly what taught him to appreciate profitability. It is also the reason his pitch to restaurants lands. He is not an outsider selling optimism. He is a former customer selling the fix.
We want to double profitability in the industry.
One strand leads to the next
Ask Sheridan to make sense of the finance-to-food-to-tech path and he frames it as a single line rather than three detours. One strand of his career led to the next, and all of them led to Nory. The quantitative background gave him a feel for data and forecasting. The restaurant gave him the problem. The technology company is where the two meet. His education tracks the same blend of numbers and strategy: a degree in economics, politics and law from Dublin City University, a master's in economics and strategy for business from Imperial College London, and an executive program at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
By early 2026 Nory had begun pushing into the United States, pitching cost-strapped American restaurants on the same promise it made in the UK and Ireland: AI that quietly does the back-office work so teams can focus on the front of house. Sheridan's stated ambition is not modest. He wants to build the world's leading hospitality technology company, and, more provocatively, to double profitability across an industry famous for razor-thin margins. Whether the number holds is the open question. But the person making the claim has stood on both sides of the counter, and that is a rarer credential than it sounds.
He also keeps a foot in the conversation itself, hosting Nory's own podcast, "What's Cooking?", where he interviews hospitality and technology leaders about making digital change actually stick. It is a fitting role for someone whose whole company is a bet that the industry's future is less about spectacle and more about getting the boring things right.