restaurant-tech
(25)
Aakar Khanna
Aakar Khanna is the co-founder and CEO of Marble (formerly Truffle), a Y Combinator S26 startup building an AI-native operating system for the restaurant back-of-house. He grew up inside his family's multi-unit restaurant business, cut his teeth as a Goldman Sachs analyst covering restaurants and food & beverage, then spent years in operations roles at venture-backed startups AtoB and Kouper before building software to tackle the two costs that quietly sink restaurants: inventory and labor.
Truffle (YC S26)
Truffle (now operating as Marble) is a New York-based Y Combinator S26 startup building an AI-native operating system for the restaurant back-of-house. It replaces the patchwork of spreadsheets, clipboards and disconnected point solutions that restaurants, cafes and bars rely on with a single system: computer vision and voice AI capture real-time inventory levels, machine-learning models forecast item-level demand, and AI agents run end-to-end workflows like procurement, invoice reconciliation, scheduling, food prep and menu engineering. Founded by Aakar Khanna (CEO) and Arjun Chaliha (CTO), it targets the billions the hospitality industry loses each year to stockouts, food waste and lost profit.
Andrea Johnston
Andrea Johnston is a seasoned revenue and operations executive with over 30 years of building high-growth businesses across SaaS, consumer tech, and marketplace platforms. After a decade at OpenTable — rising from VP of Western Region Sales to Chief Operating Officer — she led global revenue at Corel/Alludo, joined Truckstop as Chief Revenue Officer in 2024, and is now CEO at Franki, the video-led restaurant discovery and rewards app that is rewriting how 25,000+ monthly users find their next great meal. Johnston is a go-to-market architect, board advisor to multiple tech startups, and speaker at the 2025 Khosla Ventures CEO Summit.
Blackbird Labs
Blackbird Labs is a New York-based restaurant technology company that pairs a consumer dining app with a blockchain-based payments and loyalty network. Founded in 2022 by Resy and Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, Blackbird lets diners check in at participating restaurants, earn a rewards currency called $FLY, and pay their bill through the app, while giving restaurants lower payment-processing fees and direct ownership of their guest data. The company runs its own layer-2 network, Flynet, and operates in New York, San Francisco, and Charleston with roughly 1,000 restaurants on the platform.
Nory
Nory is an AI-native restaurant operating system that unifies business intelligence, inventory, workforce management and payroll into a single control centre for hospitality operators. Founded by restaurateur Conor Sheridan, it plugs into a restaurant's existing tech stack and uses real-time data plus predictive analytics - and a crew of 'agentic' AI assistants - to forecast demand, plan staffing, manage ordering and keep the P&L on track. Operators report cutting operating costs by nearly 20 percent and reducing food waste by up to 50 percent. Backed by $62.6M in funding, Nory serves multi-site groups from Black Sheep Coffee to the Jamie Oliver Group and is expanding into the United States.
Michael Mathieu
Michael Mathieu is CEO and board director of Vistify, Inc., a Santa Ana-based restaurant technology company whose vMenu platform lets QSR and fast-casual brands design, schedule, and sync digital menus in under an hour. Montreal-born and a City College of New York economics grad, he previously led video-ad network YuMe through IPO preparation, ran SET Media (later Conversant), presided over Freedom Communications' interactive arm, and founded Mecka in the NIL space. He joined Vistify in October 2024 and closed a Series A led by Craveworthy Brands and Branded Hospitality Ventures in mid-2025.
Sai Alluri
Sai Alluri is the co-founder and CEO of Momos, a Singapore-and-San Diego-based software platform that helps multi-location restaurant brands manage customer feedback, reviews, marketing, and reputation with AI-powered workflows. He was an early Uber employee, helped launch Uber Eats across Asia-Pacific, then built and ran GrabKitchen - Southeast Asia's largest cloud kitchen network - before starting Momos in 2020 with Andrew Liu after watching favorite restaurants shut during COVID. Momos raised a $10M Series A in September 2024, bringing total funding to about $16.5-17M.
AVISIO
AVISIO was a Vienna-based hospitality-tech startup that built a cloud, AI-assisted procurement and inventory platform for independent hotels and restaurants. Founded in 2019 by Matthias Depenbusch and Johannes Ossanna, it integrated with POS and PMS systems to automate stocktaking, compare supplier prices in real time, and suggest order quantities from booking data - promising roughly 10% lower purchasing costs and less waste. It raised over EUR 2 million from backers including Falkensteiner Ventures and Next Floor Ventures before filing for insolvency in April 2023.
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.
Jim Williams
Jim Williams is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of MustHaveMenus, a Bend, Oregon-based platform serving 10,000+ restaurants, hotels, and food service businesses with cloud-based menu design, digital signage, and menu management tools. Before MustHaveMenus, he sold email-marketing startup MarketHome to ClickAction for $15 million in 1999, co-founded church-tech platform Sharefaith (acquired by Ministry Brands in 2018), and made an early angel investment in HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb in 2019). An English major who started his first business at age 11, Williams embodies the accidental founder: perpetually optimistic, deeply curious about design, and committed to building software that solves genuinely unglamorous problems.
Adam Dougherty
Adam Dougherty is the co-founder and CEO of Blizzfull, a Glendale, California restaurant-technology company that builds branded websites and online ordering tools so restaurants keep their customers instead of renting them from third-party apps. A USC film-school graduate who crossed over from Hollywood into software engineering, Dougherty channels a self-described obsession with aesthetics into ordering software, an industry not known for good looks. He and co-founder Zach Zurn started Blizzfull around 2011-2012 after struggling to order office lunch, and in 2023 retooled the platform around AI for menu descriptions, marketing suggestions, and one-click website generation.
Christian Wiens
Christian Wiens is the founder and CEO of Loman AI, an Austin-based voice AI platform that answers the phone for restaurants. A former restaurant worker who started in a Southern California BBQ joint in sixth grade and later spent a decade in B2B SaaS go-to-market roles, Wiens built Loman to recapture the orders restaurants lose every night when no one can get to the phone. Since launching in 2024, Loman has processed millions of calls and tens of millions in order volume, raised a $3.5M seed round led by Next Coast Ventures, and partnered with SpotOn, OpenTable, Toast and Square.
Max Sim
Max Jai Sim is the co-founder and CEO of Meadow AI, a Seattle startup that uses multimodal AI - computer vision, natural language, and operational data - to give restaurants and retailers real-time visibility into their physical locations and to automate the manual 'secret shopper' audits chains still run by hand. A Harvard-trained applied physicist, he previously co-founded the home-closing startup Modus, acquired by Compass in 2020, and earlier worked at T-Mobile and the lunch-delivery startup Peach. Meadow emerged from stealth in late 2025 with $6M raised, including a $4.5M seed round, and more than $2.5M in contracted annual recurring revenue.
Vivian Wang
Vivian Wang is the founder and CEO of LANDED, a generative-AI hiring platform built for the people who never had software built for them: the line cooks, cashiers, baristas and shift managers behind America's restaurants, hospitality groups and retailers. Launched in late 2019, LANDED automates sourcing, screening, vetting and interview scheduling for high-volume hourly roles, and by 2025 had grown to 500+ business customers, a database of 3.2 million-plus candidates and 6.3 million-plus job matches. A Princeton graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Enterprise Technology, Wang has raised roughly $8.7M from investors including Javelin Venture Partners and Blockchain Capital, and frames her mission around the 2.7 billion hourly workers worldwide.
Spoqa
Spoqa is a Seoul-based software company that builds tools for the people who run shops and restaurants. It first became known for Dodo Point, a tablet-based loyalty service that replaced paper stamp cards across tens of thousands of Korean stores and signed up tens of millions of customers with nothing more than a phone number. After selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, Spoqa rebuilt around Kitchenboard (formerly Dodo Cart), a B2B platform that helps restaurant owners order, manage, and pay for their ingredients - matching them with vendors and using AI to turn messy supplier chats into structured orders. Along the way Spoqa also released Spoqa Han Sans, a free, open-source Korean typeface used widely across the Korean web.
Grant Sohn
Grant Sohn is the co-founder and co-CEO of Spoqa, the Seoul-based company behind Dodo Point, Korea's #1 offline rewards service, which grew past 20 million users and 10,000+ merchant partners. A Stanford economics graduate and former McKinsey analyst, he left consulting in the United States to build loyalty software for brick-and-mortar shops in South Korea. In 2018 he co-founded Carry Protocol, a blockchain venture aiming to give shoppers control of their own transaction data, and after selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, he refocused Spoqa on restaurants with Kitchenboard.
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.
Debby Soo
Debby Soo is the CEO of OpenTable, the global restaurant reservation platform serving 65,000+ restaurant partners across 110+ countries. A Stanford and MIT Sloan alumna, she took the helm in August 2020 — at the precise moment the pandemic shuttered restaurants worldwide — and transformed the business by shifting its focus from diners to restaurants as the primary customer. Under her leadership, OpenTable has achieved double-digit revenue growth in 2025 and quadrupled its share price since she joined, while forging strategic partnerships with Visa, JPMorgan Chase, and OpenAI.
Clover
Clover builds cloud-based point-of-sale systems and payment processing for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in Sunnyvale in 2010 and acquired by First Data in 2012 (now part of Fiserv), Clover bundles Android-powered hardware with a software platform for restaurants, retail, and personal services - processing well over $300B in annualized card volume.
Terrence Morash
Terrence Morash is VP, Head of Marketing (Brand and Creative) at Slice, the New York-based technology platform powering independent pizzerias across the United States. A veteran creative and marketing leader with deep roots in digital advertising, he has shaped Slice's transformation from a consumer pizza-ordering app into a full-service B2B partner for local pizza shops - building brand campaigns, a loyalty program, a POS system launch, and the 'Slice of the Union' thought leadership series. Before Slice, Morash led creative at Shutterstock, where his trend-forecasting work reached global audiences, and held senior creative roles at Rosetta, Again Interactive, and Zeta Interactive.
Kathleen Schnering
Kathleen Schnering is the Chief Executive Officer of Clover Network, one of the largest cloud-based point-of-sale platforms in the United States. Under the Fiserv umbrella, Clover serves more than 800,000 merchants across retail, restaurant, and services verticals, processing hundreds of billions in payments annually. Schnering leads a platform generating over $2.7 billion in annual revenue with a workforce of approximately 1,500 employees, steering Clover's expansion into international markets and value-added services as it targets $4.5 billion in revenue by 2026.
Max Wang
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
Eugene Johnson
Eugene Johnson is the founder and CEO of Revi, an AI-powered restaurant POS and revenue growth platform headquartered in San Francisco. Growing up in one of New York City's roughest neighborhoods, Johnson started his first business at 18, built a career in enterprise sales at Cisco Meraki, and pivoted to found Revi — a platform now serving 1M+ consumers and processing nearly $100M in transactions. He is also an Amazon bestselling author of 'The Mental Playbook' and a competitive chess player who ranks in the 85-90th percentile globally.
Tom Fox
Tom Fox is the Chief Executive Officer of Fingermark, a New Zealand-founded technology company that deploys vision AI, intelligent kiosks, and digital menu systems inside some of the world's biggest quick-service restaurant chains. Based in San Francisco, Fox leads a 90-person global operation whose Eyecue platform turns ordinary restaurant cameras into real-time operational intelligence - monitoring drive-thru queues, measuring speed of service, and surfacing AI-generated performance diagnostics across fleets of McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC, Popeyes, and Carl's Jr. locations. He brings a career built at the intersection of restaurant technology and enterprise operations, having previously served as Chief Business Officer at Omnivore (acquired by Olo), Chief Product Officer at Bite, and Head of Partnerships at Ansa.
Eli Chait
Eli Chait is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wholesail, a San Francisco-based B2B payment risk management platform modernizing accounts receivable for food and beverage distributors. His origin story is unusually grounded: at age 12, he was entering invoices for his father's restaurant in Los Angeles. That early hands-on encounter with the pain of paper-based B2B trade became the north star for his entire career - from co-founding Copilot (a restaurant analytics startup acquired by OpenTable) to leading Wholesail through a $22.6M Series A. With a team of repeat entrepreneurs forged at OpenTable, Wholesail is building the credit and payments network for the $1+ trillion US food distribution market.