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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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 (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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 (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 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. 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.
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 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 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 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 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.
Slang AI builds an agentic voice AI platform purpose-built for restaurants and hospitality. Its 'Superhost' answers every inbound call 24/7 with warmth and precision - booking and modifying reservations, fielding private-dining and event inquiries, recognizing returning guests, and routing high-value requests to staff. The platform serves 2,000+ restaurant locations, has handled roughly 25 million calls from 10 million unique guests, and reports 95%+ guest satisfaction, helping operators stop missing calls and recover lost revenue.
Snackpass is a restaurant technology company that builds an all-in-one marketing and point-of-sale platform for quick-service restaurants. It pairs hardware - registers, self-serve kiosks, kitchen display systems and pickup screens - with software for online ordering, loyalty, SMS marketing, analytics and AI. Founded by Yale students in 2017 as a social food-ordering app, it grew into a full operating system for takeout, serving thousands of restaurant operators and tens of millions of guests.
Touchpoint Restaurant Solutions (touchpoint.io) is a Palo Alto-based restaurant technology company that bundles point of sale, kitchen display, drive-thru line-busting, online ordering, loyalty, and AI-driven marketing into one unified platform branded OmniFusion and OmniLoyalty. Founded by Stanford-trained entrepreneurs led by CEO Israel L'Heureux, the company targets enterprise quick-service and pizza chains that want to consolidate a sprawling tech stack, own their guest data, and run loyalty programs that actually get used - it claims chain-wide participation rates of 80-90% versus a single-digit industry norm.
MarginEdge is a restaurant management software company that turns the back office paperwork of running a restaurant - invoices, food costs, inventory, vendor payments - into real-time, actionable data. Founded in 2015 by restaurant veterans and technologists, the platform digitizes invoices, tracks theoretical vs. actual food costs, delivers daily profit-and-loss reports, and lets operators pay vendor bills with no added fees. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, it now serves more than 10,000 restaurants across the U.S. and Canada.