Tom
Fox

There is a camera above the drive-thru speaker at your local McDonald's. For most of fast food's history, that camera saw everything and understood nothing - footage looping into an abyss, unreviewed, unused. Tom Fox is the person responsible for changing that. As CEO of Fingermark, he runs the company that taught those cameras to think.

Fingermark's Eyecue platform turns ordinary restaurant IP cameras into an always-on AI observer. It tracks how long a car has been in the drive-thru, flags when a queue backs onto the road, measures the gap between ordering and pickup, and surfaces all of it as clean, actionable intelligence across hundreds of locations simultaneously. The kind of operational clarity that used to require a regional manager standing in a parking lot with a stopwatch now arrives automatically in a dashboard on someone's phone in New Zealand.

Fox joined Fingermark in August 2025 as President and GM for North America, and ascended to CEO. He arrived already fluent in the language of restaurant technology - having spent the previous decade watching the industry evolve from connectivity to intelligence. His career has been a map of exactly that journey.

Before the AI era of restaurant tech, there was a plumbing problem: every restaurant brand ran on a different point-of-sale system, and none of them talked to each other. Omnivore built the universal API to fix that. Fox was their Chief Operations Officer from 2017, later becoming Chief Business Officer - the person connecting operators, vendors, and technology partners in a fragmented ecosystem. When Olo acquired Omnivore in March 2022, it was a clear signal that restaurant tech consolidation was accelerating.

Fox's next move was to Bite, a restaurant ordering and loyalty platform, where he served as Chief Product Officer. He understands the full stack from the inside - not just what operators need, but what it takes to build, ship, and scale a product in a sector where downtime at 11:45am on a Friday means thousands of missed lunch orders.

Prior to that, he led IT and DevOps at Various Inc., and held the COO and interim CCO seat at PGM Inc. - a career built in the operational trenches, not the boardroom. At Fingermark, that operational DNA is exactly what the product demands. You do not sell AI to McDonald's by showing a demo. You earn it by proving reliability at scale, in the rain, at 6am, on a Tuesday.

Fingermark was founded in 2006 in New Zealand by Luke Irving - two years before Apple launched the App Store, and fourteen years before AI-powered computer vision became a marketing buzzword. Irving's bet was on longevity: build hardware and software that serves quick-service restaurants well, stay close to the operators, and let the technology cycles come to you. When computer vision became viable at the edge, Fingermark was already positioned to lead because they were already in the kitchen.

Fox now stewards that inheritance, with the added pressure and opportunity of a category that is moving faster than it ever has. NVIDIA partnerships. Ecolab investments. A SOC 2 Type II compliant platform processing live video across entire restaurant fleets. The stakes have changed. The fundamentals have not: serve faster, smarter, every time.

In May 2025, Fingermark announced it was integrating NVIDIA's AI Blueprint for Visual Search and Summarization into Eyecue. The integration enables QSR operators to convert video footage into structured, searchable intelligence at a scale previously unavailable to restaurant brands. Instead of reviewing hours of footage to diagnose a service bottleneck, operators get an AI summary of what happened, when, and why.

A year before that, Ecolab - the $15 billion global leader in water, hygiene, and infection prevention - made a multimillion-dollar investment in Fingermark. Ecolab operates across 170 countries and serves the foodservice sector as closely as any company in the world. Their bet on Fingermark was not speculative: it was a vote of confidence in AI as a practical operational tool for the restaurants they already serve every day.

Fingermark also became a Certified Deliverect Partner in June 2025, deepening its integration with the digital ordering ecosystem that now powers most major QSR chains. The platform is SOC 2 Type II compliant, runs on edge servers with 24/7 AI processing, integrates with Oracle, NCR, PAR, Adyen, and other POS systems, and works with existing IP cameras - no rip-and-replace required.

This is the stack Fox inherited and is now accelerating. For operators who spent years being told that AI was coming soon, Fingermark is delivering the version that works in the rain, with six cars in the lane, at 7:30 in the morning.

Fingermark was founded in 2006 - the same year Twitter launched and two years before Airbnb. That longevity means Fox inherited a company with genuine institutional knowledge of what works in restaurant technology, not a startup chasing a trend. The company sponsored New Zealand's Blackbots robotics team at the FIRST Robotics World Championship in March 2025 - a detail that tells you something about the culture he is working within.

Fox is based in San Francisco, a 12-hour timezone gap from Fingermark's founding team in Hastings, Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. Leading a global operation across that divide requires a particular kind of operational discipline. It also positions Fingermark's North America growth story as a genuine US-market build, not a remote sales operation, with Fox as the on-the-ground embodiment of that expansion.

His education at Cabrillo College - a California community college - traces a career arc that went from systems engineering grunt work to running a global AI company. Not through venture funding or Stanford connections, but through a sequence of bets on sectors at inflection points: restaurant connectivity when it was still clunky, restaurant AI when it was still skeptical, and now vision AI when it is just becoming inevitable.

The drive-thru at your nearest fast food restaurant is generating more data than any human could process. Tom Fox is building the machine that finally does something with it.