Skift Take
Our inaugural list of top tech startups in 2018 contains best-of-breed examples from the kitchen to the host stand and beyond. Restaurant tech is a complicated and fast-growing landscape full of well-intentioned ideas, but success today and beyond lies in the execution of those ideas in a human-powered industry.
If you're a chef, an owner, or an investor, you may be fearful to bet on tech. New software may sound great, but will it actually get used by your team? And will it last or go the way of Betamax or Polaroid, becoming irrelevant?
With those worries in mind, we reviewed dozens and dozens of young tech companies. We then collected only the top startups we feel confident have built solutions in 2018 that are the operational equivalents of sous vide cooking and the at-home immersion circulator: they'll still be essential tools for years to come. In short: You got this tech thing, and we got your back.
This list is Skift Table's first attempt at spotlighting the most impressive new or little-known restaurant tech startups.
We are drawing on the knowledge we have gained through five years of coverage of hundreds of newly launched startups in travel, events, hospitality, and restaurants, both at Skift Table and our sister site, Skift.
To help differentiate between unicorns and brands in hyper growth mode, we include only startups that have raised less than $25 million in funding. In the reporting of this feature, some startups fell off the list because of the cap, including notable companies Resy and Reserve. Resy has raised $40 million — up from the $15 million that was previously reported, and Reserve's total stands at $27.3 million. Both continue to impact the industry through an important entry point: dining reservations.
Our list of 13 top startups in 2018 spotlights a mix of consumer and business-to-business models, with a few that derive revenue from both. Some of these companies are profitable. Most aren't. We believe all of them address problems that are legitimate enough that customers will pay for their solutions, in due course, and that their number of potential customers is large.
Note: These are sorted in alphabetical order rather than ranked.
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Startups to Watch
BentoBox
New York, NY
A restaurateur's dev team
Money Raised: $9.3 million
Headline Investors: Bullpen Capital and Armory Square Ventures
Skift Table Take:
BentoBox occupies an all-important niche in restaurant operations: modernizing a restaurant’s web presence. Unlike Squarespace or Wix, BentoBox focuses on creating a content management system that specifically delivers what restaurant operators need from a website. Mobile design and functionality is a top priority, as is making the most important information
