A restaurant can remember your birthday and still forget your business. SevenRooms built software to close that gap - and DoorDash agreed to pay roughly $1.2 billion for it.
Resy began by asking diners to pay for scarce tables. Restaurants told the founders what they actually needed - better software - and that correction became a dining platform, an American Express loyalty engine, and a useful lesson in listening before scaling.
OpenTable is the online restaurant-reservation marketplace that connects diners with tables and gives restaurants the software to manage them. Founded in San Francisco in 1998, it pairs a consumer booking app and website with a back-of-house table-management and CRM platform, helping more than 60,000 restaurants worldwide seat roughly 1.9 billion diners a year. It is owned by Booking Holdings, which acquired it in 2014 for $2.6 billion.