foodtech
(25)
Alon Chen
A family WhatsApp thread about Friday dinner became Tastewise, an AI system built to tell food companies what people want before the focus group comes back.
Glife Technologies Pte Ltd
Glife Technologies is a Singapore-based B2B food and agri-tech company that digitizes the food supply chain across Southeast Asia. It connects farmers and suppliers directly with restaurants, hotels, caterers and retailers through an app-based sourcing marketplace, its own cold-chain distribution network, and an in-house ERP platform called GlifeWare. By cutting out layers of middlemen and aggregating demand, Glife aims to lower costs for buyers, give farmers reliable access to end-buyers, and improve food safety and food security in the region.
Grubtech
Grubtech is a Dubai-based restaurant technology company that builds a unified operating system for food and beverage and quick-commerce businesses. Its middleware platform, gOnline, connects fragmented software touchpoints - POS systems, ERP, delivery aggregators like Talabat, Deliveroo, Careem and Uber Eats, kitchen displays, dispatch and analytics - into a single dashboard so restaurants, cloud kitchens, grocers and pharmacies can run online and in-store operations without juggling multiple screens. Founded in 2019, the company has raised $33.4M and operates across roughly 18 markets.
JALA
JALA is an Indonesian aquaculture technology company that helps shrimp farmers raise more shrimp with less risk. Founded in 2017 in Yogyakarta, it pairs IoT water-quality sensors with a farm-management app and layers on financing, quality inputs, expert consultation, and a marketplace for harvests. The goal is an end-to-end digital ecosystem that makes shrimp farming more productive, transparent, and sustainable across Indonesia's fragmented supply chain.
Stephen Klein
Stephen Klein is the co-founder and CEO of Hyphen, a San Jose food-robotics company that builds the automated Makeline - a hybrid manual-and-robotic assembly system that runs beneath the counter to build bowls and plates at up to 350 meals per hour. A self-described foodservice fanatic since childhood, Klein started a text-to-order frozen yogurt business in college, helped scale Instacart in its early days, and ran operations at robotic coffee bar Cafe X before launching Hyphen in 2020 with co-founder Daniel Fukuba. Hyphen has since drawn investment from Tiger Global, Chipotle and Cava and deployed systems with chains and foodservice operators across the country.
Incredo
Incredo (formerly DouxMatok) is a foodtech company that makes real cane and beet sugar taste sweeter, letting food manufacturers cut sugar by 30-50% without artificial sweeteners, sugar alcohols or a change in taste, mouthfeel or texture. Its patented Incredo Sugar binds sugar to a natural carrier so it dissolves and reaches taste receptors more efficiently, and because it is still sugar it can be labeled cleanly. Founded in Israel in 2014 and rebranded to Incredo in 2023 alongside a $30M Series C, the company works B2B with confectionery, bakery and spread makers to reformulate everyday sweet products.
Sauce
Sauce is a Miami-based restaurant technology company that helps independent restaurants and small chains build a profitable direct online ordering and delivery business. Instead of surrendering 30% commissions and customer data to marketplaces like DoorDash and Uber Eats, restaurants use Sauce to take branded direct orders and fulfill them through a managed, commission-free courier network charged at a flat per-order fee. The platform bundles online ordering, managed delivery, live order support, local SEO, and AI-driven marketing and retention into a single system aimed at turning delivery from a cost center into a margin driver.
Tastewise
Tastewise is an agentic AI platform built exclusively for the food and beverage industry. It combines proprietary consumer panels, market trackers, and trillions of real-time food signals with AI agents trained on food behavior to help brands spot trends earlier, validate new products, win retail and menu placement, and automate marketing and sales. Its tools are used by a large share of the world's leading F&B companies, including Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Kroger.
Kelly Thompson
Kelly Thompson is a food industry executive with more than 30 years of experience who led Incredo (formerly DouxMatok), the sugar-reduction technology company behind Incredo Sugar. Trained as a food engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she built her career in research, development and quality at Kraft Foods, WhiteWave Foods and Continental Mills before joining Incredo in 2022 to head North America. She rose to Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Executive Officer, steering the commercialization of a real-cane-sugar ingredient that lets manufacturers cut sugar by up to half while keeping the taste.
Hyphen
Hyphen builds the Makeline, an automated meal-assembly system that sits beneath a restaurant's counter and portions and plates digital and takeout orders while staff handle the guest-facing line above it. Paired with its CulinaryOS software for menus, orders, inventory and labor, the San Jose company aims to raise peak-hour throughput and order accuracy without replacing kitchen workers. Founded in 2020 by Stephen Klein and Daniel Fukuba, Hyphen has raised roughly $59M and counts Chipotle and Cava among its strategic investors and pilot customers.
Shin Starr Presents Corp.
Shin Starr Presents Corp. is a Korean-American foodtech company building autonomous, AI-powered robotic kitchens. Its 'Autowok' system - a modular, Lego-block robotics platform - cooks Korean BBQ and seafood with minimal human intervention, including inside moving OLHSO food trucks that finish dishes 'en route' so meals arrive minutes after cooking. Founded in 2019 by Kish Shin and Jay Shin, the company operates OLHSO branded trucks and a San Mateo restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area and is targeting airports, campuses, and corporate cafeterias for expansion.
Traveling Spoon
Traveling Spoon is a food-tourism marketplace that lets travelers eat home-cooked meals, take private cooking classes, and tour local markets with vetted home cooks - mostly women - in their own kitchens around the world. Founded in 2011 by Haas MBA classmates Aashi Vel and Steph Lawrence, the company turns a stranger's dining table into the most authentic seat in a foreign city, giving hosts a new income stream and travelers a meal you can't find on any restaurant menu.
Bo Davis
Bo Davis is the co-founder and CEO of MarginEdge, an Arlington, Virginia restaurant management and bill-payment platform he launched in 2015 with fellow restaurateur Roy Phillips. Before software, Davis ran restaurants - he founded Wasabi, a group of conveyor-belt sushi spots in D.C. and Boston. Before restaurants, he sold an education software company, Prometheus, to Blackboard in 2002 and served in the Peace Corps in Macedonia. MarginEdge, which turns a shoebox of restaurant invoices into real-time cost data, has raised more than $120 million and serves thousands of restaurants across North America.
Matt Barnard
Matt Barnard is the cofounder and CEO of one.bio, a Sacramento biotechnology company turning plant fiber into odorless, tasteless nutrients that can be dosed into everyday food to reshape the gut microbiome. A seventh-generation Wisconsin farmer turned technology operator, he first became known as the cofounder and CEO of Plenty, the SoftBank-backed indoor vertical farming unicorn. He now applies the same obsession - control what people eat, control their health - to fiber science spun out of UC Davis.
Jon Carter
Jon Carter is the CEO and Founder of Prado, an Austin-based technology platform that connects physicians, nutrition providers, and food businesses to make food function as medicine — unlocking $170 billion in pre-tax HSA/FSA dollars for medically tailored meals. Before Prado, Carter built a career spanning digital product leadership at Union Bank and Live Nation (where he ran eCommerce for 600+ artist brands including Jay-Z and Madonna), and CEO of Snap Kitchen. His father died from type 2 diabetes, and that loss transformed into a professional mission: eliminate the friction preventing food from operating as healthcare.
Stephanie Lawrence
Stephanie Lawrence is the co-founder and co-CEO of Traveling Spoon, the marketplace she built to put travelers at a stranger's dinner table around the world. Born from a failed quest to learn dumplings from a Chinese grandmother, the company connects guests with vetted home cooks - 95% of them women - across dozens of countries for private meals, cooking classes, and market tours. A Dartmouth and UC Berkeley Haas MBA who worked with Alice Waters and Google.org before launching, Lawrence turned a travel frustration into a business that funnels income to local women while preserving family recipes that might otherwise vanish.
Solarbiotech
Solarbiotech is a U.S.-based synthetic biology and biomanufacturing company that helps companies move precision-fermentation products from lab bench to commercial scale. Built around a Norton, Virginia plant with fermentation capacity from 6L to 10,000L and a modular 'BioNodes' architecture, it offers end-to-end strain-to-shelf services - upstream fermentation, downstream processing, and commercial production - for food ingredients, nutraceuticals, cosmetics, enzymes, and industrial bioproducts. After a 2024 Chapter 11 restructuring, its assets were acquired by Pictor Biotech (led by ex-Novozymes executive Peter Rosholm) and unified in January 2025 with GPC Bio and Eleszto Genetika into a vertically integrated, 100+ person SynBio platform.
MarginEdge
MarginEdge is a restaurant management software company that turns the back office paperwork of running a restaurant - invoices, food costs, inventory, vendor payments - into real-time, actionable data. Founded in 2015 by restaurant veterans and technologists, the platform digitizes invoices, tracks theoretical vs. actual food costs, delivers daily profit-and-loss reports, and lets operators pay vendor bills with no added fees. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, it now serves more than 10,000 restaurants across the U.S. and Canada.
TurtleTree
TurtleTree is a biotech and food-tech company that makes lactoferrin - one of the rarest and most valuable proteins in cow's milk - without the cow. Using precision fermentation, its flagship ingredient LF+ recreates the bioactive milk protein at scale for use in immunity, gut health, sports nutrition and infant nutrition products. In 2025 TurtleTree became the first company in the world to win an FDA 'No Questions' GRAS letter for precision-fermented lactoferrin, clearing it to commercialize in the U.S.
Rian Mc Donnell
Rian Mc Donnell is the founder and CEO of FloVision Solutions, an AI company putting cameras and sensors on meat-processing lines so beef and poultry plants can see exactly where yield and quality slip away. He grew up around beef processing in rural Ireland, studied mechanical and manufacturing engineering at Trinity College Dublin (with a year at UC Berkeley), and built the company out of a Trinity student project before moving it to the United States via Notre Dame's ESTEEM program and SOSV's IndieBio. Now headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, FloVision has analyzed more than 23 million kilograms of food and raised an $8.7M Series A led by Insight Partners in 2025.
ezCater
ezCater is the leading U.S. workplace food platform, connecting companies that need to feed teams, meetings and events with a network of more than 100,000 local restaurants and caterers. Founded in Boston in 2007, it turned the messy, phone-and-fax world of office catering into software - online ordering, delivery logistics, billing and analytics - serving everything from a 5-person lunch to a 2,000-person conference. Now a $1.6B company, it has expanded from a transactional marketplace into an enterprise food management platform.
Fork & Good, Inc.
Fork & Good is a Jersey City-based cellular agriculture company growing real meat from animal cells instead of whole animals. Founded by urban-farming entrepreneur Niya Gupta and cultivated-meat pioneer Gabor Forgacs, the company built a pilot factory that produces cultivated pork using a patented bioprocess centered on muscle cells and high-density bioreactors. Its goal is to reach price parity with commodity meat - targeting roughly $2 per pound - while using a fraction of the land and water of conventional farming. In 2025 it acquired California's Orbillion Bio to combine cultivated pork and beef under one global platform spanning North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Brook Mayer
Brook Mayer is a senior technology executive at OpenTable, the global restaurant reservation and discovery platform owned by Booking Holdings. With over 25 years of experience spanning engineering, product, and executive leadership roles - including stints as CTO, CPO, Chief Architect, and VP of Engineering - Mayer brings a deep technical foundation to the hospitality technology space. Based in San Jose, California, Mayer has been associated with OpenTable's leadership during a period when the company manages millions of diners and tens of thousands of restaurant partners worldwide. The Facebook and Twitter accounts linked to Mayer's profile point to Foodspotting, the restaurant dish-discovery app acquired by OpenTable in 2013 for approximately $10 million, suggesting an involvement with that product's leadership and integration.
Roger Salameh
Roger Salameh is a General Partner at Swanlaab Venture Factory's AgriFood Fund I, bringing over 30 years of hands-on agribusiness and biotechnology leadership to the venture world. A veteran of Monsanto, Calgene, and Arcadia Biosciences - where he served as interim CEO and then COO - Salameh now deploys capital into early-stage agri-food tech startups from his perch in Napa, California, while simultaneously running DnA Advisory Services, a consultancy helping AgTech and FoodTech companies navigate the path from innovation to commercialization.
Vaseem Anjum
Vaseem Anjum is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and CEO of Innowi Inc., a Santa Clara-based restaurant technology company delivering all-in-one POS, kiosk ordering, QR code ordering, and kitchen management solutions to restaurants across the US. Before entering the restaurant tech space, he founded SchoolCity Inc. in 1999, an influential K-12 assessment and personalized learning platform that served nearly 2 million students across 140+ districts before merging into Illuminate Education in 2018. With a hardware engineering background spanning National Semiconductor and NEC Electronics, Anjum brings a rare arc from chip design to edtech exit to hospitality software.