🥞 Restaurant Tech Landscape

Building on the foundational work by Thomas Reiner (Partner at Altimeter Capital), we expanded the modern Restaurant Tech Stack using Specter’s intelligence platform, mapping 500+ startups across the evolving landscape of Point-of-Sale, KitchenOps, Inventory, Staffing, Guest Experience, and the rapidly growing embedded fintech layer.

The 2020s mark a clear shift from fragmented point-solutions to platformization in restaurant tech — led by players like Toast ($TOST), Square, and Lightspeed — offering full-stack vertical SaaS tailored to hospitality operators. These platforms no longer stop at POS; they are becoming the financial operating systems for restaurants, unlocking high-margin products like lending, instant payouts, working capital, and card processing.

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Delivery

Owner.com (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 24,787)
Owner.com positions itself as “Shopify for restaurants,” now powering digital ordering and marketing for 10 000+ eateries. The Palo Alto start-up landed a $33m series b (Jan 2024) to triple ARR, then announced a $120m series c that pushed its valuation past $1b and doubled head-count to 200. Its newest AI tools send restaurant-branded emails and loyalty rewards automatically, underpinning rapid GMV growth.

Buncha (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 2,184)
Buncha’s weekly-route model lets a single refrigerated van deliver dozens of neighbourhood orders, keeping the flat fee at $3.45 and cutting route emissions by ≈80 % . The Minnesota company’s Sep 2022 venture round (Goodwater Capital et al.) fuels launches in Michigan and Wisconsin while the app tops 10 K installs with 4.3-star reviews.

Chowdeck (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 24,192)
Since debuting in Oct 2021, Chowdeck has crossed 1m+ completed orders and employs 6,000 riders, claiming 30-minute delivery across Lagos and beyond. A $2.5m seed round (Apr 2024) extends service to Abuja and Port Harcourt as legacy rivals exit Nigeria’s food-delivery market.

ezCater (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 31,676)
ezCater now lists 100 000+ restaurant partners and reports bookings growing ≈60 % YoY since the 2021 office rebound. A $100m series d (Dec 2021) lifted total funding to $421m and valued the firm at $1.25b. With partnerships like Panera, management eyes an eventual IPO while expanding workplace-meal analytics.

Finance & Accounting

Ottimate (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 343,398)
Provides AI-powered end-to-end AP automation that now serves 20 k+ finance teams. Co-founders Bhavuk Kaul and Ram Jayaraman rebranded Plate IQ to Ottimate in Dec 2023 and operate from the San Francisco–Oakland corridor. The company is in growth stage (series b), having raised $164m in total—the latest a $160m series b on 4 Nov 2021 led by FTV Capital, with earlier support from Y Combinator and Tamares. Recent 2025 releases add multi-tab invoice browsing and real-time fraud alerts, while ARR hit $17.6m in 2023. Based in San Francisco, CA (US).

Qodeup (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 34,587)
Lets diners in Italy scan a QR code to view menus and pay, integrating directly with the venue’s POS. Founded in 2019 by Fabio Marniga (with early tech architect Stefano Allegra) in Brescia, the startup remains Seed Stage. It has raised about $4m across two seed rounds, most recently on 11 Oct 2022 led by The Techshop, with Bocconi University and FoodBrand also on the cap-table. Specter signals show strong web-traffic momentum as Qodeup rolls out its smart-menu SaaS to hundreds of independent restaurants. HQ in Milan, Italy.

Sunday (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 323,133)
Lets guests pay a restaurant bill in under 10 seconds via QR code, a workflow that saved partners 60 million minutes of table-turn time and processed $2b+ since launch. Co-founders Victor Lugger, Tigrane Seydoux and Christine de Wendel raised a $100m series a on 22 Sep 2021 (led by Coatue & DST Global), bringing total funding to $124m. In early 2025 Sunday added Checkout.com rails to deliver T+1 payouts across seven countries. HQ in Atlanta, GA (US).

Treinta (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 267,341)
Equips micro-merchants in 18 LatAm countries with a free bookkeeping and inventory app, replacing paper ledgers. Founded in 2020 by Lluis Canadell and Man Hei Lou, the Bogotá fintech is Early Stage. It closed a $46m series a in Apr 2022 (one of LatAm’s largest) bringing total funding to ≈$64m, with backing from Luxor Capital, YC, Soma Capital and others. Treinta surpassed 5m merchants by June 2023 and is piloting credit products to deepen monetisation. HQ in Bogotá, Colombia.

Guest Service Workflow

Peblla (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 7,488)
Offers an all-in-one POS that folds reservations, waitlists, table management and omnichannel ordering into a single tablet interface, letting independent restaurants cut no-shows and speed up turns. A $1.37m round (17 Nov 2023) led by early-stage fund TSVC places Peblla firmly in the Pre-seed/Seed bracket. Rockville-based founder Jason Liu now focuses on product-led growth and a self-serve onboarding flow.

Hyphen (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 327,221)
Hyphen’s Makeline is an automated food-assembly platform that augments human workstations with robotics and software, enabling kitchens to portion and plate hundreds of meals per hour with industrial precision. Deployed in commercial and QSR settings, the solution integrates ingredient dispensers, recipe management, and performance monitoring to cut labor costs, minimize waste, and ensure consistency. A $24m corporate round led by Tiger Global in 2022 accelerated Hyphen’s rollout across U.S. markets, complementing prior AgFunder-backed investments in R&D and manufacturing capacity.

Interactions (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 348,601)
Interactions’ enterprise IVA platform fuses conversational AI, generative models, and live agent handoff to automate voice and chat support for global brands. Underpinned by 131 patents and 20 years of R&D, its Human Assisted Understanding™ ensures accurate intent recognition, secure authentication, and seamless escalation—enabling clients to save over $300m annually in support costs. Late-stage profile and raised $162.8m (last round: $56m, Aug 9 2016, Series Unknown) from SoftBank, Comcast Ventures and Updata, Interactions powers both self-service bots and agent-assist tools across contact centers, delivering scalable, compliant CX automation.

Inventory & Supply Chain

Wisk Solutions (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 17,212)
Wisk Solutions offers a precision inventory management platform tailored for bars and restaurants, automating stock tracking, recipe costing, and purchase orders. Its real-time data integration—compatible with over 50 POS systems—delivers up to 99.7% inventory accuracy and reduces shrinkage by as much as 80%, saving operators 20+ labor hours per month. Founded by Ciprian Rarau, the company raised $120k. Based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Kaso (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 3,547)
Kaso digitizes and automates the B2B food-supply ordering process for restaurants and suppliers across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, boasting a 10× user growth to 3,500+ partners within six months of launch and targeting $300m GMV by year-end. Founded in 2021 by Manar Alkassar and Ahmed Soliman, Kaso is in Pre-seed / Seed, having raised $13.1m (last seed on August 21, 2024) from BY VP, Byld Ventures, Cyfr Capital, Derayah Venture Capital, Spade Ventures, Vulpes Ventures, Y Combinator, and Youcef Oudjidane. Based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

BlueCart (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 274,108)
BlueCart powers an end-to-end B2B e-commerce and wholesale ordering platform, connecting 125,000+ restaurants to thousands of vendors through features like predictive ordering, menu-profitability benchmarking, and integrated vendor payments. Since its 2014 founding by Jag Bansal and Konstantin Zvereff, BlueCart has processed over $2b in transactions and raised more than $18M across equity and debt, including a $250k debt facility on March 31, 2023. Based in Sunnyvale, California, USA.

Crunchtime (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 325,563)
Crunchtime delivers cloud-based operations management software for multi-unit restaurants, enabling 750+ brands across 150,000+ locations to optimize inventory, labor, and task execution. The platform—trusted by 4 of 5 of the top 50 U.S. chains—recently surpassed $100m in ARR and has expanded global support teams in the UK and Australia. Founded by Bill Bellissimo, Crunchtime remains privately held with no disclosed funding rounds, partnering with Battery Ventures to accelerate innovation. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Loyalty/CRM

inKind (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 2,990)
Austin-based inKind extends debt-free capital to restaurants and lets diners earn ~20 % back when they pay through its marketplace app. Founded in 2017 by Johann Moonesinghe (with Andrew Harris, Matt Saeta, Miles Matthias & Raj Moonesinghe), the company has channelled more than $250m to operators while keeping its own outside capital modest—about $9.1m raised to-date, most recently an undisclosed amount series a on 15 Jun 2023. Investors include Techstars and FJ Labs. Head-count and web-traffic momentum; recent press says the platform aims to support “hundreds of thousands” of venues within five years.

Seated (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 266,986)
Seated rewards diners with up to 30 % credit for eating at 2 000 + curated restaurants across NYC, Boston, Dallas and Atlanta. Founded by Atallah Atallah, Blaine Bolus, Bo Peabody and Brice Gumpel, the New York-headquartered startup has raised ≈ $35m over five rounds. Backers span Rho Capital, Insight Partners and Greycroft. App-store listings tout growing loyalty features, whith 82 employees and estimated $20m revenue.

Marketing

It’s Good (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 1,215)
It’s Good is an invite-only social app for saving and sharing trusted recommendations for food, travel, and experiences, founded in 2023 by Mike Rosenthal and John Legend. The platform’s core features include curated “hot lists,” in-app rating tools, and a seamless referral engine to help users discover new spots via people they know and trust. It secured a $5m seed round on October 13, 2023 (Seed) led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to deepen its chef and restaurant partnerships. Based in Los Angeles, California, It’s Good is rolling out neighborhood-based discovery feeds to boost local engagement.

Boostly (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 1,685)
Boostly delivers an end-to-end SMS marketing and guest-feedback platform for restaurant operators, automating review solicitation, loyalty prompts, and two-way messaging. Founded in 2017 by Mikey Murphy and Shane Murphy, Boostly raised $22m in a series a on February 10, 2025—led by PeakSpan Capital with participation from Y Combinator, Trestle Partners, and Singularity Capital—to scale its AI-driven personalization engine and expand integrations. Headquartered in Lehi, Utah, the company reports a 3× increase in monthly active users and is piloting an in-app ordering module.

Popmenu (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 31,110)
Popmenu is an all-in-one restaurant marketing and ordering SaaS platform combining digital menus, online ordering, and review management into a single dashboard. Founded in 2016 by Brendan Sweeney, Justis Blasco, Mike Gullo, and Tomas Baros, it closed a $65m series c round on June 11, 2021—led by Tiger Global Management with Salesforce Ventures, Bedrock Capital, Base10 Partners, and Felicis Ventures—to accelerate development of its Popmenu Max API suite and partner marketplace. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Popmenu has since tripled its customer base and is introducing AI-driven menu personalization.

Attentive (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 79,628)
Attentive is a conversational commerce platform offering personalized SMS and email marketing for digital-first brands. Co-founded in 2016 by Brian Long, Andrew Jones, and Ethan Lo, Attentive’s latest transaction was a secondary market round in August 2023, contributing toward its $863m total funding to deepen its consent-based messaging framework and analytics capabilities. Based in New York City, Attentive processes over 10 billion messages per year, serves 8 000+ enterprise customers, and is reportedly preparing for an IPO.

Payroll / Workforce / HR

Lineup.ai (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 3,648,036)
Lineup.ai’s AI-powered forecasting platform delivers accurate hourly, daily, and weekly sales forecasts and automatically generates optimized shift schedules—helping restaurant operators hit labor-cost targets and avoid over- or understaffing. The software integrates seamlessly with leading POS and data-management systems, giving managers back significant time once spent on manual scheduling. Founded by a small core team whose details are not publicly disclosed, Lineup.ai remains entirely bootstrapped with no external investors.

Culinary Agents (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 12,219)
Culinary Agents is a Pre-seed/Seed-stage hospitality recruiting platform that uses AI-driven candidate matching and exclusive compensation insights to connect kitchen, beverage, and service talent with employers across restaurants, hotels, and events. Recent enhancements include the launch of HospitalityCareerPaths.com for detailed career mapping and pay data, alongside exclusive compensation benchmarks and industry-specific resources. Founded in 2012 by Alice Cheng, Jun Seok Yoon, and Raymond Chan, the company has raised $4.25m, most recently an undisclosed Later Stage VC round in early May 2020, and is headquartered in New York City.

Homebase (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 31,114)
Homebase’s all-in-one team-management app empowers 100,000+ small businesses with employee scheduling, time clocks, payroll processing, HR compliance, and team messaging. In April 2024, Homebase closed a $60m series d led by L Catterton Growth with participation from Emerson Collective, Notable Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, and PLUS Capital—bringing total funding to $189m. Co-founded in 2014 by John Waldmann and Rushi Patel, the platform integrates real-time POS and sales data to automate labor-cost optimization and shift reminders, saving managers several hours weekly on administrative work. Headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Gusto (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 2,898)
Gusto’s cloud-native people platform streamlines payroll, benefits administration, and HR for small and medium-sized businesses. In its April 2025 Feature Focus, Gusto rolled out time tracking for salaried employees and custom document automation for new hires—extending real-time insights and compliance features to exempt teams alongside hourly workforces. Founded in 2011 by Josh Reeves, Edward Kim, and Tomer London, the company has raised over $746.1m across 17 rounds. With $500m in annual revenue and a $9.6b valuation, Gusto serves hundreds of thousands of businesses from its San Francisco headquarters.

POS / Ordering

Next Order (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 37,105)
Helps restaurants accept commission-free online orders, integrate third-party marketplaces, and track drivers in real-time from a single POS and kitchen-display stack. Founded in 2016 by William Richards and Brody Goatman, the Melbourne-headquartered company remains bootstrapped with no external funding to date. Specter highlights show sustained head-count and traffic momentum. Based in Melbourne with satellite offices in London, Bengaluru and Manila.

Polo (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 36)
Builds an iPhone-easy POS and payments suite for Latin-American cafés and restaurants, bundling inventory and dynamic table-ordering under one roof. Founded in 2022 by Aldo Piaggio, Andrés Richardson and Juan Chomali, the Mexico-City startup closed a US $500k seed round on Sep 2024, with backers including Y Combinator and Plug and Play. Specter signals rank Polo top-tier for head-count, traffic and social-follower growth across the category.

UrbanPiper (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 82,700)
Is the Bengaluru SaaS layer that connects restaurant POS systems with delivery apps; it now processes 18 % of all online food orders in India and powers brands from McDonald’s to KFC. In April 2022 the firm raised US $25m series b (part of a US $39.2m total) led by Tiger Global, Peak XV and Sequoia, alongside Swiggy and Zomato. Specter lists it in Growth Stage, with strong social-follower and app-download momentum.

TouchBistro (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 322,999)
Delivers an iPad-first all-in-one restaurant OS that now serves 16 000+ venues across 100 countries, transacting US $14b annually. Founded in Toronto by Alex Barrotti and Geordie Konrad, it secured CAD $150m (≈ US $110m) growth financing in Nov 2022 from Francisco Partners, bringing total funding to US $319.6m and cementing its Late-Stage status. Specter flags robust web-traffic scale-up despite recent head-count contraction.

Reservations

Guestplan (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 550,807)
Guestplan’s cloud-based reservation and table-management suite powers thousands of independent restaurants. Founded in 2005 by Bas van ’t Wout, the Amsterdam company is still bootstrapped and no external funding rounds. Its “all-inclusive” subscription (no per-cover fees, 30-day free trial) links to Google Reservations and a free iOS app, helping venues slash no-shows and streamline wait-lists. Headcount and web-traffic momentum during 2024-25.

Libro (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 2,556)
Montréal-based Libro provides a white-label reservation and guest-engagement platform used by 2,500+ restaurants. In Feb 2023 it landed an undisclosed strategic investment from Fondaction, joining earlier backer BDC Capital, to accelerate expansion across North America and Europe. The company closed 2022 with a 74 % jump in recurring revenue and continues to add table-management, loyalty and marketing features.

Tablelist (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 340,406)
Boston startup Tablelist lets nightlife operators sell VIP tables, tickets and guest-list spots in real time. Founded in 2013 by Julian Jung and Kyla Moore, it has raised roughly US $1m (series unknown/a, Nov 2017) from 414 Media Advisors, Boston Syndicates, SMVentures and others. Recent releases add Pulse activity feeds and in-app analytics aimed at boosting spend per guest across the platform’s U.S. venue network.

Tripleseat (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 75,229)
Tripleseat is the leading event-management and group-sales platform for 18,000+ restaurants, hotels and unique venues. Founded by Alex Lassiter, Nick Miller and Tom Merrihew, the Atlanta firm secured a growth investment co-led by General Atlantic and Vista Equity in April 2023; Reuters put the deal’s valuation near US $500 million. The capital is funding product R&D, payments expansion and selective M&A as Tripleseat scales globally.

Table Management

Ordercube (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 9,915)
Ordercube’s smart LED-based waiter-call cube and SaaS platform consolidates eight hospitality functions—waiter call, table planner, LED candle, reservation management, theft protection, NFC ordering, global API, and feedback—over a Bluetooth mesh network, enabling venues to boost revenue and optimize staff utilization. Co-founded by Daniel Pasternak and Igor Suslov in 2016 in Grafing near Munich, it remains in Pre-seed / Seed stage, backed by GoBeyond, METRO Xcel, and Techstars with $144k raised in a Seed round on March 2019. Partnerships with METRO AG, NH Hotels, and Aramark underscore its traction, while momentum in web traffic and customer adoption signals robust growth. Based in Munich, Germany.

Meitre (🌟 Specter – Global Rank 23,817)
Meitre is a commission-free restaurant reservation platform that boosts visibility and optimizes table management. Founded by Juan Ignacio Caviglia and Luis Caviglia. In pre-seed / seed backed by 500 Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Brad Flora, Canary, Giovanni Gardelli, Matt Fichtner, and Y Combinator, with a total funding of $1.72m and last raised on May 2019 – seed. Highlights include Headcount Dip, Web Traffic Dip, Web Traffic Decline. Based in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Bistrochat (🌟 Specter – Global Rank 35,475)
Bistrochat is an all-in-one restaurant reservation and table-management system that streamlines bookings and guest management. Founded by Alexandre Sonier, Hacene Taibi, and Xavier Besnault. In Pre-seed / Seed backed by MOX, Orbit Startups, and SOSV, with a total funding of $1.15m and last raised on January 2022 – seed. Highlights include Web Traffic Momentum, App Downloads Momentum, App Downloads Scale-up. Based in Hong Kong.

Hostme (🌟 Specter – Global Rank 43,846)
Hostme is a cloud-based reservation and table management system for restaurants, offering waitlist, server rotation, analytics, and POS integration. Founded by Evgeny Popov, Marina Alinchenko, Alexey Strakh, and Slava Koltovich. In Pre-seed / Seed backed by Schaffer Family Trust, with a total funding of $2.9m and last raised on April 2021 – Convertible Note. Highlights include App Downloads Momentum, App Downloads Scale-up, Conversion Lift. Based in Washington, D.C., USA.

Strategic Outlook

The restaurant-tech stack is crystallizing around specialized “micro-modules”—AI-driven table-assignment engines, guest-routing beacons such as Ordercube’s LED cubes, reservations/CRM hybrids like Tock and Chope, and autonomous delivery fleets—rather than monolithic point-of-sale suites. Beneath the surface, cloud-native data fabrics now pipe real-time table status, payment, and loyalty signals into orchestration layers that keep sensitive guest profiles inside regulated data spaces while still powering predictive upsell and staffing models.

Vertical stacks are maturing across every service node in hospitality. Smart waiter-call cubes (Ordercube) shave minutes off table turns; reservation platforms that began life as ticketing engines (Tock) or South-East Asian booking networks (Chope, now inside Grab) have expanded into payment, marketing, and event-management rails. Meanwhile, lidar-guided sidewalk robots (Serve, Coco) and drone corridors (Zipline, Wing) push hot-food ETAs below 15 minutes in early U.S. pilots.

Capital flows are accelerating. NetSuite notes that 73 % of operators boosted tech budgets in 2024, with contactless ordering, kiosks, and integrated delivery APIs topping spend priorities, while nearly $3.5b has poured into food-delivery robotics since 2019. Growth-stage rounds in guest-engagement SaaS now routinely hit $10 – $20m, and strategic buyers—Squarespace (2021) then American Express (2024) for Tock, Grab (2024) for Chope—are moving earlier to secure full-stack capabilities.

Looking ahead, expect convergence on open API schemas linking POS, delivery, and reservation systems, real-time diner identity graphs with opt-in personalization, and an arms race for talent versed in edge-AI vision, federated learning for menu data, and robotics safety. This next wave will define the adaptive, guest-centric operating layer that underpins tomorrow’s always-on, data-driven restaurants—globally.

Key Takeaways

Purpose-built AI beats “one-size-fits-all” POS suites. Smart micro-modules—LED waiter-call cubes (Ordercube), algorithmic table-rotation engines (Tock), and dynamic pricing blocks (Chope, now inside Grab)—deliver faster ROI than generic chatbots or sprawling legacy stacks.
Privacy-first data fabrics & federated learning are moving front-of-house. To stay on the right side of GDPR and PCI DSS, reservation and payment vendors increasingly keep guest profiles in “local data spaces” while training seat-prediction models across venues via federated techniques.
Vertical stacks speed go-to-market. End-to-end suites that pair reservations with CRM (Tock), waiter-call hardware with table planners (Ordercube), or booking networks with payments (Chope × Grab) win pilots because operators can switch on multiple workflows at once.
Open API & model-interoperability standards loom large. Operators want best-of-breed modules (forecasting, loyalty, labor, robotics) to plug into any POS backbone—echoing the payments industry’s shift to ISO 20022-style schemas.
Compliance-first positioning is now table-stakes. Vendors that foreground data residency, audit trails, allergen tagging and explainable AI (e.g., kitchen-vision QA) turn regulation into a competitive moat.
Seed rounds swell to $5m–$12m. Tiger Global’s $10m series b into Checkmate’s unified ordering voice-AI illustrates a funding band that has become common for automation-heavy restaurant SaaS.
Bootstrapped outliers still chart alternative paths. Tock grew on customer revenues before its $400m cash exit to AmEx (June 21 2024), showing product-led traction can precede VC.
Talent war intensifies. Engineers leaving giants such as Stripe, DeepMind and Uber Eats are flocking to AI-restaurant startups, transferring domain expertise in MLOps, robotics safety and payments security.