Touradj Barman, photographed for Up 'n go. The face behind the QR code.
Founder · Inventor · CEO
Touradj Barman
He made the worst part of dinner - waiting for the check - optional. Then he did it without making you download a thing.
He made the worst part of dinner - waiting for the check - optional. Then he did it without making you download a thing.
In October 2017, a single table at Starlite in San Diego scanned a black-and-white square and paid for dinner. No waiter shuffling a card reader. No app. No account. Touradj Barman watched that one transaction clear and understood something most of fintech missed: the friction worth killing wasn't in the payment. It was in everything around it.
Today Barman is co-founder and CEO of Up 'n go, the pay-at-the-table company that grew out of that one square. The platform has since moved more than $1.1 billion across 16 million-plus checks for over 11 million guests at restaurants coast to coast. He still leads product design, which is a polite way of saying he is the person who refuses to add steps.
The refusal is the product. Most contactless payment tools ask you to install something, create a login, trust a wallet. Up 'n go asks you to point a camera. Scan, see your check, split it, tip, leave. The whole company is built on a sentence Barman could fit on a napkin: no app, ever.
Scan a QR code, pull up your check, pay, and walk out. No download. No account. Built to plug straight into the restaurant's existing point-of-sale - Aloha, Toast, and more.
69.1% of guests say the presence of that QR option would influence whether they come back. Barman didn't build a payment tool. He built a reason to return.
Several of Barman's patents describe web technologies that now underpin push messaging and group messaging - the quiet machinery behind notifications you get a hundred times a day. Microsoft acquired some of them. You have used his ideas without ever knowing his name.
Barman is a San Diego native who went east for school - a graduate of MIT, then an MBA from Yale - and came home to build. His career reads as a long argument with friction: software product design, software project management, and a stubborn habit of inventing his way around problems other people accepted.
The patent count sits north of 20. That number matters less than what it represents - a founder who treats "good enough" as a personal insult. Up 'n go wasn't his first company. Before it came Vaultdrop, a secure cloud-storage outfit; Roovy, a smartphone-technology venture; and GoGroups. Each one a rehearsal for the discipline Up 'n go would demand: take something clunky, make it disappear.
What separates Barman from the average serial founder is that he keeps shipping the boring part - integration. Up 'n go was among the first to wire its QR experience directly into restaurant POS systems rather than bolting on a parallel one. The guest sees magic. Barman built the wiring nobody claps for.
Our focus is always on the next thing. We're constantly evolving to meet the changing needs of our restaurant partners and their guests.
The numbers Barman likes to repeat aren't about money moved. They're about how people felt about moving it.
"Our prime motive is to provide an amazing guest experience for our restaurant partners." Not throughput. Not margin. The feeling at the table.
"Our restaurant partners have been using our solutions for years now as we deliver on our promises." Retention is the only pitch deck he trusts.
"Our focus is always on the next thing." Twenty patents in, the man treats every shipped feature as a first draft.