Before Luke Irving was selling restaurant technology across borders, he was trying to improve the school tuck shop. At Palmerston North Boys High, he persuaded the school board and McDonald’s to allow a restaurant enterprise on campus. The venture brought him a Young Enterprise award. It also makes a useful starting point for a career that has kept returning to the same setting: someone wants food, someone has to serve it, and there may be a better way to arrange the transaction.
Irving has since built Fingermark around digital menus, ordering kiosks and computer vision. His customers operate on a scale far removed from a school lunch break. Yet the distance between an idea and its adoption remains the interesting part of his story. There are screens to build, customers to convince, people to recruit and planes to catch. The business of shortening a queue can require considerable patience.
The customer gets the screen
A Wellington bar supplied another beginning. Irving was running the bar when he experimented with turning a touchscreen point-of-sale system towards customers so they could place their own food orders. The gesture was small enough to describe in a sentence. Its business implications took rather longer to work through. If a customer could enter an order, there was an opening for a company that understood both the equipment and the setting in which people would use it.
Fingermark began making hardware and software for digital kiosks. Among its early adopters were Rebel Sport, Westfield and Sky City. Irving later described making 63 flights across the Tasman in pursuit of the Yum Brands contract. That number gives the origin story a welcome dose of inconvenience. The turned screen was the idea. Repeated journeys were part of the work of making a buyer trust it.
Irving’s account of pursuing the Yum Brands contract. A founder’s sales calendar, rendered in boarding passes.
His school years are a reminder that practical work and classroom work can produce different results. He has spoken openly about struggling with the learning environment. Much later, his proposals for teaching technology would put real projects and commercial conversations closer to students. The young person who could persuade adults to change a tuck shop had found a kind of work he could understand.
A business measured in boarding passes
By 2018, Fingermark’s export approach included collaborations with technology companies such as Intel and NCR. Those relationships helped the New Zealand business reach decision-makers overseas. The country-of-origin FernMark also formed part of its presentation to customers. Geography was something to explain and use, rather than a reason to stay home.
Irving’s account of entering the United States is especially useful because it puts the steps in an unglamorous order. In a 2023 reflection, he described first learning the cultural differences, then building relationships, then selling and scaling. A company can bring working equipment to a new country and still have plenty to learn about how people buy it. Familiar products do not guarantee familiar conversations.
Fingermark’s technology exporter recognition at the AmCham awards marked a result of that effort. In the same year, Irving addressed attendees at MURTEC in Las Vegas, where the company was exhibiting for the first time. The team demonstrated an extension of Eyecue that captured restaurant events for review and training. There was a new product to explain and another room of people who needed to see what it could do. The travel continued.
The village was a business decision
In 2016, Irving moved his family and the business base from Auckland to Havelock North. The choice brought an international technology company into an old warehouse in a regional town. It also put a practical question to the usual map of tech employment: why should the job require the people doing it to live in a large city?
In a 2019 interview, Irving described developers exchanging cramped Auckland accommodation for more space in Hawke’s Bay. He talked about shared barbecues, time with families and the opportunity to think with fewer distractions. He called Havelock North “Silicon Village”. The nickname has a grin built into it. The underlying ambition was more serious: local young people should be able to see a technology career without automatically seeing a departure date.
He was discussing a proposed teaching campus with the Eastern Institute of Technology, where students could follow ideas into development and commercial work. It was an ambition, rather than an accomplished campus. His argument placed businesses inside the education process. Employers needed talent, and they could help students understand the work by opening the door to it.
“the further you can see, the bigger you think”Luke Irving, on the move to Hawke’s Bay
The view from the drive-thru
Fingermark’s present product range gives the restaurant problem three different views. Supersonic handles self-service ordering. Supernova manages digital menus. Eyecue uses computer vision to make restaurant activity visible to operators. Each begins with something concrete: an order, a menu, a customer’s progress through the site.
A screen can record a choice. A camera can help explain a delay. The distinction matters because a restaurant is full of events happening at once. A useful view has to help the team decide where attention belongs. For the customer, the whole technological arrangement eventually has to show up as service that makes sense.
QSR Magazine included Irving in its 2025 Digital Disruptors feature. His stated direction was towards real-time tools that could help staff during service, with Eyecue expanding beyond the drive-thru to the wider restaurant. He described the benefit as having “eyes everywhere”. The phrase captures his interest in visibility; the more consequential question is what a team can do with what becomes visible.
In May 2025, Fingermark announced work towards integrating NVIDIA’s visual search and summarisation technology into Eyecue. Its Monitor tool already gathered footage around events such as a long wait or a bottleneck. The proposed enhancement would summarise and tag video, making it easier to search. The goal was less time spent watching recordings and a clearer route to understanding what happened.
More people around the table
In June 2024, Fingermark announced a multimillion-dollar cornerstone investment from Ecolab. For Irving, the attraction included collaboration around customers in the quick-service restaurant industry. An investor with established foodservice relationships could bring more than money to a company seeking wider adoption. Capital and access could support the same practical task: getting the technology into places where it would be used.
There is an earlier, more personal version of Fingermark’s international connections. A message from Brazilian digital kiosk developer Romulo Nunes led to a working relationship and his appointment as chief technology officer. By 2017, the company had an engineering team in southern Brazil and plans for some of its members to move to Hawke’s Bay. An email had become an organisation spanning two countries.
The surrounding details keep Irving from becoming a set of corporate titles. He had played competitive cricket before concentrating on business. Asked about an alternative life, he imagined fronting a pub rock band. Neither pastime needs to become a theory of leadership. They are simply useful reminders that the founder in the customer meeting has interests beyond the meeting, and might prefer a microphone for reasons unrelated to a conference panel.
Room for the next generation
Irving’s attachment to Hawke’s Bay has also taken the form of support for organisations outside Fingermark. In 2020, the company became a major corporate sponsor of Hawke’s Bay Foundation, with its contribution directed to administration costs. Paying for the work behind charitable giving is a rather practical kind of generosity. The organisation could spend more effort building its funds instead of finding money to keep operating.
In March 2025, Fingermark announced naming sponsorship of the New Zealand Blackbots’ FIRST LEGO League and FIRST Tech Challenge teams ahead of the world championships in Houston. Irving welcomed the chance to support students taking their skills onto an international stage. The connection to his earlier regional ambitions is straightforward: young people making things, a local business helping, and a path that reaches beyond the region.
These projects bring a different scale into the story. Alongside restaurant networks and overseas sales are students with a robot to build and a community organisation with bills to pay. A company can matter to its home through decisions that seldom feature in a product demonstration.
Giving someone else the chair
By 2025, Irving was already talking about a business that needed to become less dependent on its founder. In BNZ’s growth report, he described leadership, people and operational efficiency as priorities for the next phase. He also explained how hardware and installation revenue had helped fund innovation that created software subscription businesses. The early maker of kiosks was considering the organisation required to support what followed.
The report recorded an ambition to build a leadership team capable of supporting growth from $30 million in revenue to $100 million. Those figures described a direction, rather than a completed result. Just as revealing was his attention to dispersed teams, duplicated effort and getting people the right tools. An international company creates internal queues of its own.
In 2026, Tom Fox took over as CEO. Irving retained his board seat and his position as a major shareholder. His announcement described a considered transition, with room for other ventures and more family time. He intended to remain involved with customers while giving Fox space to lead. After two decades, the founder’s task had changed again. There were still ideas to pursue, but another person would occupy the CEO chair. For a career built around helping things move, knowing when to move over is an appropriate next chapter.