restaurant-tech
(7)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.