Niko Ivanovic and the problem of being discovered

A good beer can have a distribution problem long before anyone worries about the delivery truck. Someone makes something worth drinking. Somewhere nearby, someone would enjoy it. Getting those two people acquainted is a business of its own. Before Niko Ivanovic co-founded SpotHopper, he was writing about emerging craft breweries while finishing a neuroscience degree. He had found a subject that combined pleasure with a practical irritation: small producers could be good at their craft and still be hard to discover.

That observation became the starting point for a restaurant technology company. It also makes a useful introduction to Ivanovic, now SpotHopper’s CEO. His public work ranges from helping restaurants find customers to proposing a mathematical account of consciousness. One undertaking involves dinner reservations. The other asks what it means to experience anything at all. Few professional biographies need to accommodate both a catering inquiry and the nature of reality.

The audience was missing

Ivanovic’s early interest in beer was a writer’s interest as well as a customer’s. He was calling attention to independent brewers whose products deserved an audience. The company’s founding story places those small producers at the center of his motivation: people with something distinctive to offer, without the staff or promotional budgets to make themselves widely known.

The problem travels easily from a brewery to a restaurant. Making a dish and persuading somebody to try it require different kinds of work. A photograph, a menu, an accurate opening time and a timely reply all sit between the kitchen and the next guest. Excellence at the stove does not automatically fill in the website. The internet remains regrettably unwilling to taste the soup.

In 2015, Ivanovic launched SpotHopper with his father, Aleksandar Ivanovic. His father had already founded and sold Webcom, a software business. Niko brought the interest in local food and beer that gives this particular venture its character. Together they were entering a market where software had to earn its place in an operator’s working day.

Milwaukee restaurants including Story Hill BKC and Sobelman’s became customers. These local names help keep the story at human scale. A restaurant marketing company can describe a national opportunity; its product still has to make sense to a person responsible for a particular dining room, on a particular street, with tables to fill.

A restaurant has enough jobs already

SpotHopper grew around the collection of tasks that follow a restaurant online. Website management sits alongside social media, email, text campaigns, ordering and inquiries about catering or private parties. The bundle reflects a recognizable difficulty: the customer’s attention is scattered across places, while the owner’s attention has limits.

There is a useful distinction here between buying a capability and getting a job done. Software can make an activity possible and still leave somebody with the responsibility of doing it. Each additional tool may arrive with its own calendar, settings and small demands. From the owner’s side of the counter, ease of use includes the amount of attention the entire arrangement consumes.

Ivanovic’s stated ambition is for SpotHopper to perform the work for restaurant operators. His emphasis falls on execution: scheduling content, improving websites and handling search visibility should require less of an owner’s day. That is a concrete way of judging automation. A feature can look persuasive in a demonstration; the harder test comes when its customer has other things to do.

The restaurant remains the point of the exercise. Ivanovic’s early enthusiasm for independent producers helps explain the choice of customer. A neighborhood business may offer something individual, while its administrative obligations look remarkably like everybody else’s. There is room for technology in that repetitive work, leaving the distinctiveness to the people cooking and welcoming guests.

Six years before the first outside check

By November 2021, SpotHopper reported more than 3,000 customers in over 30 states. It announced a $14 million Series A led by TVC Capital, describing the round as its first outside investment. The interval matters: the company had launched six years earlier. An established customer base preceded that first announced institutional check.

Ivanovic was then co-founder and chief operating officer; his father was CEO. The job titles offer a less glamorous, more useful picture of entrepreneurship than the solitary founder at a whiteboard. A company with thousands of restaurant customers has an operation to run. Selling the promise and delivering the service have to keep pace with each other.

“Showcase their skills, talent, and creativity online”

Niko Ivanovic on helping restaurants, November 2021

His language at the time returned to the restaurants’ own abilities. The company’s purpose was to give their work a wider audience. That wording connects the COO overseeing an expanding software business with the earlier writer covering craft beer. The customer had changed from a subject to write about into someone to build for.

The distinction also keeps the funding in proportion. Fourteen million dollars measures an investment in SpotHopper. It does not describe a restaurant’s success, and it says nothing about Ivanovic’s personal wealth. The useful question is what the company intended to make possible with the money: more sales capacity and continued development of the platform.

The second check came with an AI brief

In June 2023, TVC Capital invested another $12 million in a Series B. Announced funding reached $26 million. SpotHopper said it would accelerate its AI-based autonomous sales and marketing products, including generative AI capabilities. Artificial intelligence had become an explicit part of the investment plan.

The sequence is instructive. Ivanovic’s initial concern about discovery predated this financing by years. The newer technology offered another way to address an existing workload. For a restaurant, the relevant question is how well a campaign reaches guests or an inquiry receives a response. The machinery becomes useful through the work it completes.

Today, SpotHopper describes a business serving more than 20,000 restaurant partners and a team exceeding 800 people. Those are company-reported figures. They suggest a different organizational task from the one facing a new venture in 2015: maintaining delivery across many customers while continuing to develop the product.

Ivanovic now leads that business as CEO. Its footprint includes American offices and development and operations in Serbia. The enterprise built around local discovery has acquired the coordination problems of a much larger organization. Even software designed to take work off somebody’s plate needs people to build it, explain it and keep it working.

And then he wrote about consciousness

There is another Ivanovic project with a rather different customer journey. In October 2023, he began publishing chapters of Sciopartum, his writing about consciousness, intelligence and emergent systems. The associated project is called Sciops. Its questions extend far beyond the practical applications of AI in a restaurant.

Announcing the book, he said he had spent roughly six years researching and writing in his spare time. He chose to release chapters individually, with context for readers. This was a substantial side undertaking, running alongside years spent building SpotHopper. In a public exchange, he recalled that he had already started writing during the Greendesk days.

His opening chapter proposes a framework for understanding emergent structures through mathematics. It discusses information, compression and the relationship between parts and wholes. These are Ivanovic’s theoretical proposals. They belong in a profile as evidence of the questions occupying him, rather than as scientific conclusions the reader is asked to accept.

The writing also sets out criteria he wants research to meet, including simplicity and predictions that can be tested. That gives the project a more specific shape than a general enthusiasm for AI. He wants to explain how systems produce experience, and to put that explanation into a formal framework. A chapter dated October 2024 examines other theories of consciousness in relation to his approach.

The juxtaposition is part of what makes him interesting. In business, automation promises to reduce the attention a task demands. In his theoretical writing, attention and experience become questions to investigate. The connection is an editorial reading of his two pursuits, rather than a claim that one produced the other. Both are plainly present in his public work.

Back to the table

A founder’s choice of problem can tell us something useful without requiring an invented account of his private life. Ivanovic chose the independent restaurant: a business whose individual character is often its appeal, and whose online chores can be repetitive. His stated goal gives that choice continuity, from writing about small brewers to running a company that markets neighborhood dining rooms.

His ambitions now occupy two very different scales. SpotHopper aims to help restaurants compete for customers with less manual marketing work. Sciops takes on questions about consciousness and intelligence. One can be discussed over a demonstration of a restaurant website. The other may require a rather longer lunch.

The beer at the beginning of the story remains a useful guide. Someone has made something they care about. Someone else might appreciate it. Ivanovic has spent much of his working life organizing the introduction.