restaurant-technology
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quinn Goldstein
Quinn Goldstein is the founder and CEO of YepChat, a Venice Beach-based voice AI platform built exclusively for restaurants. He and his MIT classmate Daniel Ingram launched the company in 2015 to fix the one piece of restaurant technology everyone ignored: the ringing phone. YepChat turns calls into digital orders, routes them intelligently during peak hours, and scores phone health across 18 metrics for brands like Sweetgreen, Tender Greens, Ruth's Chris, and Alfred Coffee. Before YepChat, Goldstein founded the group-activities service Vixzy and spent years as a startup advisor at GCG.
Thibault Le Conte
Thibault Le Conte is the founder, CEO and CTO of OrderOut, a Miami-based software company that funnels orders from UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhub and other delivery apps straight into a restaurant's existing point-of-sale system, killing the tablet pileup that clutters kitchen counters. A computer-science engineer trained at EPITECH and UC Berkeley, he built roughly eight or nine companies before OrderOut, reusing the same core technology each time. OrderOut is deliberately bootstrapped, grown on a single $250,000 partner investment made during COVID and organic revenue since, and now runs a lean distributed team across Miami, Brazil, India, China, Ecuador and Mexico. His latest push moves OrderOut beyond integrations into restaurant finance, with same-day UberEats payouts and a delivery API that lets any business shop for the cheapest or fastest courier.
Touradj Barman
Touradj Barman is the co-founder and CEO of Up 'n go, the San Diego company that lets restaurant guests scan a QR code, pull up their check, and pay without downloading an app. An MIT graduate with a Yale MBA and more than 20 issued patents - some acquired by Microsoft and now underpinning push and group messaging - Barman started Up 'n go to solve a small annoyance, splitting the check at a single San Diego restaurant. The platform has since processed more than $1.1 billion across over 16 million checks for 11 million-plus guests nationwide.
Alex Sambvani
Alex Sambvani is the co-founder and CEO of Slang.ai, a New York voice-AI company that answers the phone for restaurants so staff don't have to. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer with a Harvard MBA, he met co-founder Gabriel Duncan on Spotify's data science team, where the two won a company-wide hackathon with a personality-forward voice app. He turned a childhood love of cooking and robotics into a company that has handled more than 25 million guest calls for over 2,000 restaurant locations. Slang.ai has raised roughly $68 million across its rounds, including a $36 million Series B, with backers ranging from Homebrew and Underscore VC to chef Tom Colicchio.
Israel L'Heureux
Israel L'Heureux is the founder and CEO of Touchpoint Restaurant Solutions (touchpoint.io), a bootstrapped Palo Alto company that unifies the messy technology stacks of large quick-service restaurant chains under one platform built around OmniFusion and OmniLoyalty. Before restaurants, he co-founded Redline Networks, a high-performance application-acceleration company acquired by Juniper Networks in 2005 for roughly $132 million. A Stanford-trained product design engineer, he has moved from kicking off BMW's X5 program to building load balancers used by hundreds of enterprises to figuring out why a drive-thru line moves slowly.
Kevin Tan
Kevin Tan is the co-founder and CEO of Snackpass, the restaurant technology company he started in his last semester at Yale that turned takeout ordering into a social, viral experience. What began as a way to skip the line for campus munchies grew into a multi-product platform - mobile ordering, self-service kiosks, loyalty and gifting - used by hundreds of restaurants. A physics graduate, musician, and self-taught engineer, Tan raised $70 million in Series B funding in 2021 at a roughly $400 million valuation and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Will Pacio
Will Pacio is the co-founder and CEO of Expo, a Dallas-based AI platform that pulls a restaurant's scattered data - POS, inventory, labor, guest feedback - into one dashboard operators can talk to. A Stanford psychology grad who walked away from a planned medical career to cook on the opening team at Thomas Keller's Per Se, he ran IT for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, founded the fast-casual chain Spice Kit, then built the restaurant-staffing marketplace Pared before spinning it into Expo. His pitch: bring the 'Moneyball' approach to multi-unit restaurants so non-technical owners can make decisions with data instead of gut feel.
Christine Schindler
Christine Schindler is the co-founder and CEO of PathSpot, the maker of the HandScanner - a device that mounts beside a kitchen sink, scans a worker's just-washed hands with light, and flags invisible contamination in seconds. A Duke-trained biomedical engineer who first built low-cost medical tools near Mount Kilimanjaro, she prototyped PathSpot's algorithms in her apartment bathroom, sold her car to fund it, and grew the company into a food-safety operating system used across the restaurant industry. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, a Time Best Invention recognizee, and the founder of the nonprofit Girls Engineering Change.
Marcus Baney
Marcus Baney is a co-founder of Spec (specapp.com), a restaurant and bar inventory management and recipe costing platform, and a seasoned beverage consultant based in Dayton, Ohio. Drawing on 11 years of hospitality experience - seven years behind the bar at Nashville's most celebrated craft cocktail bars including The Patterson House, Pinewood Social, and LA Jackson, plus four years as a bar manager and beverage director - he bridges the gap between artisan craft and operational profit. His consulting work focuses on designing cocktail programs that hit 85% gross margins while being executable by real teams. Beyond hospitality, he's an avid photographer with over 2,600 images on Flickr, a guitar player, and a golfer.
Vaseem Anjum
Vaseem Anjum is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and CEO of Innowi Inc., a Santa Clara-based restaurant technology company delivering all-in-one POS, kiosk ordering, QR code ordering, and kitchen management solutions to restaurants across the US. Before entering the restaurant tech space, he founded SchoolCity Inc. in 1999, an influential K-12 assessment and personalized learning platform that served nearly 2 million students across 140+ districts before merging into Illuminate Education in 2018. With a hardware engineering background spanning National Semiconductor and NEC Electronics, Anjum brings a rare arc from chip design to edtech exit to hospitality software.