foodtech
(11)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.