He ran a video ad network in 2008, took it toward an IPO, then spent fifteen years drifting through DAM, NIL, and SaaS. In October 2024 he took a job running a company whose product is the sign above your head at Pizza Hut. It turns out that was the point all along.
Michael Mathieu, who has been CEO of Vistify, Inc. since October 2024, spends his days thinking about a rectangular screen roughly seven feet off the ground in a Pizza Hut. Or a WaBa Grill. Or an Urban Plates. The screen is a menu board. The question is who owns the pixels on it, and how fast those pixels can be changed when a general manager in Ohio decides that the calorie count for the number-three combo should really be 780 rather than 820.
The pre-Vistify answer to this question was: a designer, a ticket in a queue, a Tuesday, and possibly a Wednesday. The Vistify answer is: someone at corporate opens a browser and drags a box. The company says a new full menu takes under an hour to build and sync across every location. The Series A investors who wrote checks in July 2025 - Craveworthy Brands out of Illinois, Branded Hospitality Ventures out of New York - clearly believe them.
Mathieu is the person selling this. He is not a first-time CEO. He is not, in the polite terminology of pitch decks, a "second-time founder." He is on his sixth run at the top of an operating structure, and the throughline is easy to see once you look for it. Every job he has taken has been about screens that sell things.
Montreal-born, City College of New York economics, President at Freedom Communications, CEO of YuMe from 2008 through the company's IPO preparation, CEO of SET Media (which became part of Conversant), President of the SaaS/Cloud Segment at Canto, Chief Revenue Officer at 12 Digit Marketing, founder of Whitecap Digital, co-founder of BeAlive Media, founder of Mecka in the NIL space, board director at Wellavi, seven years on the board of Digital Content Next. That is the resume, compressed. It reads like a career that could not decide what it wanted to be.
Read it again with the frame that everything Mathieu has done concerns a display, a piece of inventory, and a viewer whose behavior can be measured. Video ads on premium publishers. Digital asset management for creative teams. NIL platforms for athlete-brand deals. Digital menu boards for QSR chains. It is one thesis stretched across four industries. The menu is the product because the menu is the surface where a decision gets made.
He likes a specific number: digital menus, he says, boost sales by up to 38% and influence 91% of purchasing decisions. Take those numbers with the appropriate salt. They come from the industry, not from a lab. But even if the true figures are half of those, the operational implication is the same. If the sign above the counter is where most of the decision is made, then the sign is the marketing budget. And most of the enterprise QSR world still ships pixels to that sign the way it shipped them in 2011.
Vistify, Inc. was previously called Embed Digital. The rebrand happened in early 2025. The Twitter handle is still @embeddigital, which is the sort of small archaeological detail that tells you the rebrand was planned rather than reactive - they did not bother reclaiming the handle because the account exists mostly to route traffic.
The company is based at 2740 S Harbor Blvd in Santa Ana. It has 22 employees. Mathieu is CEO and a board director. Mike Sisco, the founder, is President and Chief Product Officer. Majid Nasab is CTO. Brandon Tucker runs operations. Russell Bushore runs finance. It is a lean team by the standards of a company that has to sync menu content to Toast, Square, and Clover in real time, which is what the vMenu platform does.
The most interesting shipped product is Menu Builder, which arrived in August 2025. It is a drag-and-drop designer that lets a corporate marketer produce an on-brand menu without a designer or a developer. This is not, on its face, a technically exciting claim. Drag-and-drop editors have existed for twenty years. What is exciting is the loop it closes. Menu Builder outputs to vMenu, which syncs to the POS, which pushes prices and availability back to the screen, which the analytics layer reads back so someone at corporate can see whether the new item photo is selling better than the old one. This is what Mathieu means by "measurable revenue driver." He means the menu board has become a dashboard.
The Series A came from operators, not from generalist software VCs. Craveworthy Brands owns roughly twenty restaurant concepts, including Fresh Brothers and Shaquille O'Neal's Big Chicken. They intend to deploy Vistify's software across the portfolio. Branded Hospitality Ventures, based in New York, made this its first digital-signage investment. That framing is telling. Restaurant-native capital does not usually invest in signage because signage historically means hardware and installation contracts. The bet here is that vMenu is not hardware. It is a control plane for hardware someone else installed. That is a software business with a distribution moat: once you sync a chain to Toast, the switching cost is real.
Mathieu is the person you hire to run the enterprise motion once the product-market fit is in place. This is what he did at YuMe, which is why TechCrunch wrote in 2008 that YuMe's founding CEO, Jayant Kadambi, had stepped into the President seat to make room. It is what he did as President of the SaaS/Cloud Segment at Canto. It is a specific job description - take a technically real product owned by a technical founder, and go win the accounts that would not have taken a call from a technical founder. Sisco built the product. Mathieu is here to sell it into the fifty-thousand-location tail of the QSR market.
The City College of New York is a public commuter school in Harlem. It is not, in the folkloric sense, the "right" school for the CEO of a Series A restaurant-tech startup based in Southern California. Mathieu graduated from it with a degree in economics, which is worth noting because most of the roles he has held since then reduce to a single economic argument: attention is a scarce good, screens are how it is captured, and the value of a screen is a function of how often the pixels on it can be updated in response to demand.
YuMe, in 2008, was about updating video pixels in response to viewer signals. Canto, in the mid-2010s, was about updating creative pixels in response to brand needs. Mecka, more recently, was about updating athlete-brand pixels in response to NIL rule changes. Vistify, now, is about updating menu pixels in response to inventory, weather, and time of day. You can, if you want, read the whole career as one long thesis on programmatic surfaces. He does not put it this way in public. He does not have to.
The board experience matters here too. Seven years on the Digital Content Next board (formerly the Online Publishers Association) put Mathieu in rooms with the CEOs of every major digital publisher during the platform-consolidation years. He watched, from a governance seat, what happened to a business when the surface it depended on was owned by someone else. Vistify's central pitch to enterprise QSRs is essentially a memory of that experience: own your surface, or someone else will.
Mathieu has said publicly that Vistify's platform will incorporate AI capabilities by fall 2025, to "automate updates, promotions, and decisions at scale." Read that as: dynamic pricing at the drive-thru, dayparted promotions synced to POS demand, and eventually - though he is careful not to say this - individualized menu displays for the customer who just pulled up in the app. The privacy-and-regulatory conversation around that is not one Vistify appears eager to lead. But it is one the industry will have, and Vistify will be in the room.
In the meantime the immediate work is unglamorous and correct. Ship Menu Builder. Roll it across Craveworthy's twenty concepts. Sign the next dozen enterprise chains. Prove that a menu can be a revenue driver rather than a design chore. Mathieu is 22 employees, one Series A, and a portfolio of large customers into what he has called his mission. He is running the sixth screen of his career. It is above your head at the counter.
A career that spans a Canadian ad network to Santa Ana signage covers roughly 3,000 miles and six CEO seats.
Economics degree from a public commuter school in Harlem. Not a private business feeder.
Vistify's Twitter is still @embeddigital - a small hint of what the company was called before 2025.
Craveworthy Brands, a Series A investor, owns Shaquille O'Neal's Big Chicken chain.
Vistify syncs prices to Toast, Square, and Clover. A change at HQ hits the drive-thru screen with no designer involved.
Served seven years on the board of Digital Content Next (formerly the Online Publishers Association).
Digital menus boost sales by up to 38% and influence 91% of purchasing decisions. — On why the menu is the marketing budget
Transform every menu into a measurable revenue driver. — Vistify's operating thesis, distilled
We share a vision of redefining what's possible in restaurant innovation. — On the Craveworthy Series A
He is the Chief Executive Officer and a Board Director at Vistify, Inc., a Santa Ana-based digital menu and signage platform for QSR and fast-casual restaurants.
He was CEO of YuMe, CEO of SET Media (later Conversant), President of the SaaS/Cloud Segment at Canto, Chief Revenue Officer at 12 Digit Marketing, President at Freedom Communications, and founder of Mecka and Whitecap Digital.
October 2024. Vistify closed its Series A the following July.
He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Economics from The City College of New York.
Craveworthy Brands and Branded Hospitality Ventures led the round that closed in mid-2025. Branded Hospitality Ventures called it their first digital-signage investment.