restaurant-operations
(9)
Rebel Foods took the restaurant out of the restaurant business
Faasos escaped punishing rents by moving dinner upstairs. Rebel Foods turned that experiment into a network of shared kitchens, food brands and a $1.4 billion valuation. Making the whole machine profitable is the harder course.
Fourth Put AI on the Schedule - Now It Wants to Run the Whole Restaurant
The hospitality software veteran already helps millions of workers clock in, swap shifts and count stock. Its bigger bet is that twenty-five years of back-office data can tell every restaurant manager what to do next.
Clique Hospitality
Clique Hospitality built a sizable business by making itself less famous than the rooms it runs. Now its venue-making machine is stretching from hidden cocktail bars to a 50,000-square-foot sports pool - and exporting the Las Vegas playbook without copying Las Vegas.
Arcos Dorados
Behind Latin America’s Big Macs sits a Montevideo company running 2,520 restaurants, a 115-million-user data engine and one of the region’s largest first-job machines. Its real product is consistency at continental scale.
Toast
Toast began with a stubbornly specific idea: restaurants deserved technology built for the rush. Now its software, payments, hardware and AI sit at the center of 180,000 locations - turning every order into a useful piece of operating data.
Vistify, Inc
Vistify, Inc is a Santa Ana, California restaurant-technology company whose flagship platform, vMenu, turns static digital menu boards into centrally controlled, software-defined menus for multi-unit and quick-service restaurant brands. The cloud platform lets operators design menus with a drag-and-drop Menu Builder, push changes to thousands of screens in real time, sync pricing with point-of-sale systems in under 30 seconds, and monitor what is actually displaying across every location. Founded in 2015 as Embed Digital and rebranded to Vistify in March 2025, the company serves brands including Craveworthy Brands, WaBa Grill, Urban Plates and Urbane Cafe, and is led by CEO Michael Mathieu.
Meadow AI
Meadow AI is a Seattle-based multimodal AI platform that gives restaurants and retailers real-time visibility into their physical operations. By combining computer vision, natural language processing, and data from existing point-of-sale, labor, inventory, video, and audio systems, Meadow automates the manual 'secret shopper' audits that chains have long done by hand - continuously evaluating customer experiences and staff performance, then surfacing AI recommendations to lift revenue, tighten consistency, and reduce labor costs. The company emerged from stealth in November 2025 with $6M raised and more than $2.5M in contracted annual recurring revenue.
OrderOut
OrderOut is a Miami-based restaurant integration company that pipes orders from third-party delivery apps - Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, ChowNow and more - directly into a restaurant's point-of-sale system. Instead of a countertop crowded with buzzing tablets and mismatched printers, OrderOut gives operators a single queue and one dashboard, plus a developer API and an AI operations layer that POS companies and aggregators can resell under their own brand.
Expo
Expo is an AI platform for multi-unit restaurant operators that consolidates fragmented data from POS, inventory, labor, and guest-feedback systems into a single intelligent dashboard. Non-technical managers can ask their restaurant data questions in plain English and get answers - no analysts, no SQL, no Tableau build required. Founded by chef-turned-operator Will Pacio and tech veteran Dave Lu (the team formerly behind restaurant-staffing marketplace Pared), Expo connects to systems like Toast, Restaurant365, Crunchtime, Square, and DoorDash to automate reporting and surface operational insights for chains from QSR to fine dining.