restaurant-saas
(10)
Popmenu and the menu that refused to sit still
A restaurant’s best sales pitch is usually buried in a PDF. Popmenu built a business by letting the food speak, then teaching the website to bring guests back.
TransAct Paid $3.55 Million to Stop Renting Its Software Future
The 30-year-old printer maker built a useful software business on code it did not control. Now it owns a perpetual license, runs BOHA! on Azure, and is weighing what to do with the casino unit that still pays most of the bills.
Tillster Bet the Restaurant Would Become Software. Now It Quietly Runs 180 Million Orders a Year.
The Los Angeles company spent two decades turning the humble order screen into a commerce engine. Its real trick is less visible: making kiosks, apps, loyalty, delivery and aging restaurant systems behave like one machine.
Resy’s First Idea Flopped. The Pivot Put 25,000 Venues on One Menu.
Resy began by asking diners to pay for scarce tables. Restaurants told the founders what they actually needed - better software - and that correction became a dining platform, an American Express loyalty engine, and a useful lesson in listening before scaling.
The Phone Wouldn't Stop Ringing. Hostie Turned That Restaurant Headache Into a $16 Million AI Company
A restaurateur and an AI engineer started with one painfully ordinary problem: the phone ringing during dinner service. Their answer now handles millions of guest conversations - but its real test is whether automation can make a restaurant feel more human, not less.
Checkmate
Checkmate (ItsaCheckmate.com Inc.) is a New York-based restaurant technology company that connects digital ordering channels to a restaurant's point-of-sale system. Founded in 2016 by Vishal Agarwal, its platform pipes orders from third-party marketplaces like DoorDash and Uber Eats directly into the POS, lets operators manage menus across dozens of channels from one dashboard, and now extends into first-party web and app ordering, self-service kiosks, voice AI for phone and drive-thru, catering, loyalty, and accounting reconciliation. The company reports more than 23,000 live restaurant locations and 130+ integrations, and raised a $10M Series B led by Tiger Global in October 2024.
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.
Li-ran Navon
Li-ran Navon is the founder and CEO of Sauce, a white-label ordering, delivery, and AI-driven retention platform that lets independent restaurants own their online ordering, delivery logistics, and customer data instead of surrendering margin and relationships to third-party marketplaces. A serial entrepreneur who earlier built the voice-ordering startup Say2eat through Coca-Cola's incubator, Navon has grown Sauce from scratch to eight figures in revenue with a remote-first team spread across four continents, and says Sauce helped restaurants avoid more than $20 million in third-party fees in 2024.
Vishal Agarwal
Vishal Agarwal is the founder and CEO of Checkmate (itsacheckmate.com), a New York restaurant technology company that pipes online orders from delivery apps straight into restaurant point-of-sale systems and centralizes menu management across platforms. He started the company in 2016 after waiting too long for a check at a San Francisco airport restaurant, and grew it from a bill-splitting idea into a full digital operations suite used by brands from independent eateries to Arby's and Wendy's. A former Citigroup analyst and Choxi.com marketing chief, Agarwal built Checkmate past 100 million processed orders and, backed by Inspire Brands, expanded into kiosks, reconciliation, and voice AI.
Loman AI
Loman AI is an Austin-based voice AI platform that answers restaurant phones 24/7. Its AI agent takes pickup and delivery orders, books reservations, answers menu and hours questions, processes payments, and syncs tickets directly into POS and reservation systems like Toast, Square, Clover and OpenTable. Founded in 2024 by Christian Wiens, the company pitches a simple economic case: a ringing phone that no one answers is lost money, so it turns every call into a captured order. Loman raised a $3.5M seed round in August 2025 and says it handles millions of calls and tens of millions in order volume, with early traction concentrated in the pizza category.