restaurant-technology
(46)
The Wendy's Company
Wendy's turned a square hamburger, fresh beef and a sharp online voice into a global franchise system. Its next act is less nostalgic: make thousands of restaurants feel worth the trip again while the value wars squeeze every drive-thru.
Yum! Brands
Yum! Brands built a $68.3 billion restaurant system by owning the playbook, not most of the kitchens. Now, as Pizza Hut heads for new owners, the fast-food parent is betting that franchises, data and one shared tech stack can make chicken, tacos and burgers travel farther.
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.
Abhinav Kapur
He spent his nights doing food deliveries and his days reading equity research. Then he built the software his mother-in-law never had - so every restaurant could remember its regulars.
Grubtech
Grubtech is a Dubai-based restaurant technology company that builds a unified operating system for food and beverage and quick-commerce businesses. Its middleware platform, gOnline, connects fragmented software touchpoints - POS systems, ERP, delivery aggregators like Talabat, Deliveroo, Careem and Uber Eats, kitchen displays, dispatch and analytics - into a single dashboard so restaurants, cloud kitchens, grocers and pharmacies can run online and in-store operations without juggling multiple screens. Founded in 2019, the company has raised $33.4M and operates across roughly 18 markets.
TabSquare.AI
TabSquare.AI is a Singapore-based restaurant technology company that builds an AI-powered digital ordering and customer engagement platform for the food and beverage industry. Its SmartTab tablet menus, self-service kiosks, QR-code web ordering and marketing tools use AI to deliver personalized menu recommendations, streamline ordering and payment, and lift restaurant revenue. Founded in 2012 by three INSEAD graduates, TabSquare serves thousands of outlets across Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Europe, and has been a wholly owned subsidiary of global food-delivery group Delivery Hero since 2021.
Conor Sheridan
Conor Sheridan is the founder and CEO of Nory, an AI-native operating system for the hospitality industry. A former quantitative trader and investment strategist, he left finance to build Mad Egg, one of Ireland's fastest-growing fried chicken chains, then created Nory to solve the operational problems he faced running restaurants. Nory now helps operators manage inventory, workforce, payroll, procurement and finance, and raised a $37m Series B in 2025 led by Kinnevik, bringing total funding to roughly $62.6m.
Bikky
Bikky is a customer data platform built exclusively for large, multi-unit restaurant brands. It unifies data from point-of-sale systems, online ordering, payments, and loyalty programs into a single guest view, letting operators measure how every marketing, menu, and operational decision affects guest behavior, frequency, and lifetime value. Founded in 2017 and based in New York City, Bikky serves brands like Bojangles, Dave's Hot Chicken, MOD Pizza, and Robeks across thousands of locations.
Botrista, Inc.
Botrista is a San Francisco-based food-and-beverage technology company that builds an AI-driven automated beverage platform. Its flagship BotristaPro machine lets restaurants, campuses, hospitals, theme parks and other venues serve a wide range of craft cold drinks - boba teas, smoothies, refreshers, cold brew, lemonades and more - from a single compact, self-cleaning unit in seconds, without specialized baristas. Founded in 2017 by former Tesla automation engineer Sean Hsu, the company pairs patented multi-ingredient dispensing hardware with cloud-based analytics and demand forecasting, and has raised roughly $126 million to date, including a Series C led by Jollibee Foods Corporation.
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.
Hang
Hang is a New York-based software company building an AI-powered marketing and loyalty platform for consumer brands. Marketed as 'the autonomous marketing system,' Hang replaces static points programs with personalized, gamified rewards - branded minigames, dynamic quests and 1:1 offers - alongside self-cleaning customer data, smart segments and AI-driven campaigns. It launched in 2022 as an NFT-powered membership platform backed by a $16M Series A from Paradigm, then repositioned around AI and now serves restaurant, beauty, apparel and e-commerce brands such as Just Salad, Jeni's, Boba Guys and Hattie B's.
MenuSifu
MenuSifu is a New York-based restaurant technology company that builds an integrated cloud POS ecosystem for restaurants, with deep roots serving Asian-American operators across the United States. Founded in 2014, its platform spans point-of-sale, online ordering, kitchen displays, self-ordering kiosks, loyalty and marketing, payment processing, and restaurant financing, now used by more than 15,000 restaurants. Backed by a $40M Series B in 2024, the company is expanding into AI-driven kitchen automation and fintech services for restaurant owners.
Momos
Momos is an AI customer platform for multi-location restaurant and retail brands. It unifies customer service, reviews, reputation, listings, feedback and local marketing into one system so operators can respond to guests, catch problems in real time, and turn reviews and feedback into repeat visits. Founded in 2021 by former Uber and Grab operators, Momos powers tens of thousands of locations across brands including Shake Shack, Baskin-Robbins, Just Salad and Guzman y Gomez.
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.
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.
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.
Luke Fryer
Luke Fryer is the founder and CEO of Harri, a New York-based workforce management and human capital management platform built for the hospitality industry and other service-driven businesses. A former restaurateur who opened Australia's first Burger King franchise and later held the Australian rights to wagamama, Fryer moved to New York in 2007 and co-founded Harri in December 2011 to fix the fragmented, low-tech process of finding, hiring, scheduling and retaining frontline workers. Today Harri serves over 500 enterprise customers across 35,000+ restaurant and hotel locations and roughly four million hospitality employees, and in 2023 it raised $43 million in growth equity to expand its AI capabilities and move into retail and healthcare.
Innowi Inc.
Innowi Inc. is a Santa Clara, California restaurant-technology company that builds an all-in-one point-of-sale and ordering platform. Its stack spans POS, self-service kiosks, tabletop QR ordering, online ordering and delivery, a kitchen display system, marketing and rewards, analytics, and employee management - designed to help independent and multi-location restaurants cut third-party commission fees, sync orders across channels, and run leaner operations.
LinkToAny
LinkToAny (formerly ShoppinPal) is a Los Angeles-based integration platform that helps commerce software providers onboard merchants, migrate data between systems, and connect the apps a business already runs. Its iPaaS-style platform links point-of-sale, ecommerce, accounting, loyalty and ordering systems - working with names like Shopify, Lightspeed, Clover, Intuit/QuickBooks, Square, GoDaddy and PayPal - so platforms can go live with new merchants in days rather than weeks, with an increasingly AI-native approach to onboarding and migrations.
Kickfin
Kickfin is an Austin-based fintech that automates how restaurants and hospitality businesses calculate and pay out tips. Instead of managers counting cash and stuffing envelopes at the end of each shift, Kickfin pushes gratuities in real time straight to employees' existing bank accounts - no cash, no cards, no waiting. Founded in 2017, the company was the first end-to-end digital tip management platform and has since paid out more than $2 billion to over 250,000 restaurant workers, integrating with major POS and payroll systems to eliminate manual uploads and reduce tip errors.
Shin Starr Presents Corp.
Shin Starr Presents Corp. is a Korean-American foodtech company building autonomous, AI-powered robotic kitchens. Its 'Autowok' system - a modular, Lego-block robotics platform - cooks Korean BBQ and seafood with minimal human intervention, including inside moving OLHSO food trucks that finish dishes 'en route' so meals arrive minutes after cooking. Founded in 2019 by Kish Shin and Jay Shin, the company operates OLHSO branded trucks and a San Mateo restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area and is targeting airports, campuses, and corporate cafeterias for expansion.
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.
William Wang
William Wang is the founder and CEO of MenuSifu, a New York-based restaurant technology company that started by dragging Asian restaurant owners off paper order pads and onto cloud point-of-sale, and now runs an AI-and-automation ecosystem serving 15,000-plus restaurants across all 50 states. Built 'by restaurant people, for restaurant people,' MenuSifu closed a $40 million Series B in 2025 and is pushing into kitchen robotics, smart beverage automation, payments and restaurant financing.
Yu Li
Yu Li is the co-founder and COO of MenuSifu, the New York restaurant technology company that has become the top point-of-sale provider for Asian restaurants in North America. Starting in 2013 as a POS system for independent Asian restaurants, MenuSifu has grown into an integrated ecosystem of payments, online ordering, financing, and AI-driven automation serving more than 15,000 restaurants across all 50 states. Under Yu Li's operating leadership the company raised a $40 million Series B in 2025, powers MIXUE's U.S. expansion, and Yu Li himself was featured on the Nasdaq Times Square billboard as part of the 2025 Asia Milestone Makers Cohort.
Blizzfull
Blizzfull is a Glendale, California restaurant technology company that bundles online ordering, POS, self-service kiosks, kitchen screens, branded websites and apps, marketing, and loyalty into one AI-powered platform. Founded in 2012 by web developers Adam Dougherty and Zach Zurn, it charges restaurants a flat monthly fee and takes 0% commission on direct orders, positioning itself against third-party delivery apps that take up to 30%. Blizzfull's pitch is that independent restaurants should own their customers, their data, and their revenue, and it says it powers more than 1,000 restaurants nationwide.
Incept AI
Incept AI is a New York-based voice AI company building order-taking systems for quick-service restaurants, starting with the two hardest environments in the business: the drive-thru and the phone. Founded in 2024 by former Amazon and Presto Automation engineers, Incept pairs a proprietary neural audio engine that strips out background noise, echo and crosstalk with foundation models and POS integrations, so the AI can complete restaurant orders end-to-end without a human stepping in. The company says its system reaches 95%+ order completion without human intervention, well above the roughly 83% where most competitors escalate to a person, and raised a $3 million pre-seed round led by Rally Ventures in early 2025.
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.
Up 'n go
Up 'n go is a San Diego fintech that lets restaurant guests pay their check by scanning a QR code or tapping a texted link - no app to download. Diners view the bill, split it any number of ways, pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, PayPal, a card or gift card, and leave feedback, all from their own phone. Built to plug directly into POS systems like NCR Aloha, Toast, Oracle Micros and Simphony, the company was among the first to bring app-free pay-at-the-table to U.S. restaurants and has since processed more than $1 billion across nearly 14 million contactless payments at chains from First Watch to Fox Restaurant Concepts.
YepChat
YepChat is a Los Angeles company that builds a phone and communication platform made specifically for restaurants. It routes calls dynamically, captures missed calls, turns inbound phone traffic into digital orders and reservations, filters robocalls, and layers on SMS and analytics. It began around 2015 as an intelligent business-texting product powered by IBM Watson, then pivoted to serving the restaurant industry, where phones ring at the worst possible moments.
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.