The Santa Clara company quietly rewiring how restaurants take orders - and trying to talk them out of paying a third of every check to delivery apps.
Innowi Inc. - the wordmark that sits on kiosks, POS terminals and kitchen screens across North America. Photographed as it appears on the company's own storefront: 3240 Scott Blvd, Santa Clara.
Ask any restaurant owner what keeps them up at night and, sooner or later, someone says it out loud: the delivery apps take roughly a third of the check. Innowi Inc. built an entire company around that one sentence.
Founded in 2014 and headquartered at 3240 Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara, California, Innowi makes restaurant technology - specifically an all-in-one point-of-sale and ordering platform. The pitch is direct: give a restaurant every channel it needs on a single system, and let it stop renting its own customers from third-party marketplaces.
The founding team, Asif Rao and Zia Hasnain, came out of mobile-device engineering at Motorola. That heritage shows in the product. Where a lot of restaurant software feels bolted together, Innowi's stack is designed to move an order cleanly from a kiosk, a QR code, a website, or the counter - straight onto a single kitchen screen.
It is not the loudest name in restaurant tech. It does not have Toast's public listing or Square's brand ubiquity. What it has is a focused product and a base of operators - many of them Indian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Korean and Thai concepts - who wanted a system that treated their business as the whole thing, not a plug-in.
Today Innowi runs a team spread across three continents while keeping its center of gravity in Silicon Valley. Third-party trackers place headcount somewhere between 88 and roughly 100 people. The company is led by CEO Vaseem Anjum, whose previous company, the edtech firm SchoolCity, was acquired by Insight Venture Partners in 2018.
Headcount and financial figures are drawn from third-party data providers and are approximate; sources vary. Fee savings reflect Innowi's own marketing claim, not an independent audit.
Modern restaurants juggle a mess of disconnected tools: one tablet for each delivery app, a separate online-ordering site, a card terminal, a scheduling app, a loyalty program. Orders arrive from everywhere and rarely talk to each other. Staff spend the dinner rush re-keying tickets and paying commissions on each one.
Innowi's answer is consolidation. Its platform aims to pull every channel - in-store, kiosk, tabletop QR, website, and delivery marketplaces - into one system that lands on a single kitchen display. Fewer tablets, fewer mistakes, and, crucially, more orders flowing through channels the restaurant actually owns.
Two features tell you who the product is really for. The first is an offline order-taking mode, so service keeps running when the internet drops - an unglamorous feature that busy operators ask for constantly. The second is OrderHub, which aggregates delivery orders into one feed to end the tablet-hopping that defines a chaotic Friday night.
All-in-one point of sale that merges KDS, printers and online orders, with loyalty integration, refund management and an offline mode.
Self-service terminals that reduce counter labor and nudge larger average orders through guided upsells.
Guests scan, browse a digital menu, order and pay from the table without waiting on staff.
Branded pickup and delivery that cuts reliance on third-party apps and their commissions.
A single real-time screen that consolidates tickets from every ordering channel.
Pulls orders from multiple delivery marketplaces into one feed to end tablet-hopping.
Reporting and analytics across sales, orders and operations for single and multi-location owners.
Customer engagement, loyalty and rewards tied directly to POS and ordering data.
Staff and operations tooling built into the admin app.
The restaurant POS market is crowded with well-funded giants - Toast, Square for Restaurants, Clover, Lightspeed, TouchBistro, Revel. Innowi does not try to out-spend them. Its edge is threefold:
Innowi runs on B2B SaaS plus payments. Revenue comes from:
Funding is modest and lightly documented - reports mention a small early raise and a pandemic-era SBA loan - which fits a company that has grown mostly on product and service rather than headlines.
Innowi occupies the middle ground between a bare card terminal and an enterprise restaurant suite: broad enough to run a whole operation, small enough to serve a single food truck or a growing regional chain with real attention. Its expertise is engineering-first - a mobile-hardware pedigree turned toward self-service kiosks, offline reliability, and multi-channel order sync.
That places it in the fast-growing restaurant-technology segment, where the durable question is not who has the most features but who takes the least from the operator. By anchoring on fee reduction and owned ordering channels, Innowi is wagering that restaurants increasingly want to control their own customer relationships rather than rent them.
Ex-Motorola engineers Asif Rao and Zia Hasnain start the company to build restaurant technology.
Future CEO Vaseem Anjum's earlier company, SchoolCity, is acquired by Insight Venture Partners.
An SBA PPP loan helps retain staff as restaurants pivot hard to contactless and online ordering.
An expanded product line - kiosk, QR, online ordering, KDS, marketing - is documented across new assets.
Trackers place Innowi near 90-96 employees across North America, Asia and Europe.
Innowi builds an all-in-one restaurant technology platform - POS, self-service kiosks, tabletop QR ordering, online ordering and delivery, a kitchen display system, marketing and rewards, analytics, and employee management.
Its headquarters is at 3240 Scott Boulevard, Santa Clara, California, with an additional office in Orange, California, and staff across three continents.
It was founded in 2014 by former Motorola engineers Asif Rao (Co-Founder & President) and Zia Hasnain. Vaseem Anjum serves as CEO.
Through B2B SaaS subscriptions for its POS and ordering software, payment processing, and add-on modules such as kiosks, online ordering and marketing - plus a restaurant referral program.
Innowi positions itself as a single unified platform focused on cutting third-party delivery fees (up to 30% by its claim) and serving overlooked international-cuisine restaurants, competing on breadth and hands-on service rather than scale.
Profile compiled from public sources including innowi.com, LinkedIn, and third-party company databases (Tracxn, getLatka, The Org, Crunchbase, ZoomInfo). Financial and headcount figures are third-party estimates and may vary; fee-savings figures reflect Innowi's own marketing claims. Sources: innowi.com · linkedin.com/company/innowinc · tracxn.com · getlatka.com · theorg.com