Houston-based restaurant tech company HungerRush has made multiple leadership appointments in recent months while changing trends in the restaurant industry have opened opportunities for its point-of-sale product.
Chief Revenue Officer Olivier Thierry, who joined the company last fall, said the company’s acquisitions in recent years were spurred by New York-based private equity firm Corsair acquiring a majority stake in HungerRush in 2022. The investment also led to two waves of leadership changes.
“When the new investors are looking at that at the company, they're looking at value creation as well, such as how do we create value and have an outcome for the investors over the next three to five years?” Thierry said. “And sometimes that means you're growing a company from, you know, from $100 million to $300 million. You're looking to find those executives who've had that experience of growing companies to that level.”
Among the latest appointments HungerRush made was bringing in Ashishh Desai as vice president of input and output sales. Desai was one of the co-founders of Menufy, a Kansas City-based point-of-sales startup that HungerRush acquired in 2021. Thierry pointed to Desai's appointment as another example of value creation from acquisition.
When looking for other opportunities for acquisitions, Thierry said new technologies such as artificial intelligence were prime targets. The company acquired OrdrAI in 2020 and launched a voice chatbot in August, beginning with Michigan-based chain Jet’s Pizza.
Thierry said labor shortages in restaurants were driving clients to find innovative solutions for common restaurant industry issues, such as answering phones — which can then be taken over by products such as OrdrAI.
“I've got people also coming into my restaurant, and I've got limited staff. Do I have [the staff] answer the phones or deal with the people in the restaurant?” Thierry said. “The answer is: Don't limit your food production. [Labor issues] aren’t going away any time soon.”
HungerRush’s business also benefited from the pandemic-driven increase in digital ordering at restaurants. Thierry said a surge in independently owned restaurants bringing in digital order services required the company to think of its market in two streams: multiunit streams and independent operators.
“If you’re an independent owner, you might own one or two restaurants, and you don’t need to think of cloud services or anything like that,” Thierry said. “But when you have 500-plus restaurants and you want to push out a menu change, you’re not driving around the country — you’re doing it from the cloud. We tailor our offerings for each stream because they’re different.”
Despite HungerRush making acquisitions around the country, Thierry said the company’s operations in Houston mean it has a wide variety of restaurants to work with.
“It’s a great location for this kind of business,” Thierry said. “If you say, ‘I really want to be at the center of the Twittersphere, this [city] is not it. But if I want to create a really strong base for customer support, this is a customer-centric city.”
Other opportunities the company has considered include expanding the point-of-sale product outside restaurants to the hospitality industry. While discussing Pappas Restaurants' departure from Hobby Airport, Thierry said there could be opportunities for hotels to implement AI ordering for room service, though he noted that not all opportunities — such as selling to airport-based units — are applicable.
"Sometimes the juice is not worth the squeeze when it comes to chasing a single unit at an airport and dealing with complications there," Thierry said. "But there are opportunities to take AI stuff and apply it to hospitality. [Hotels are] not just beds — there's food and beverage too. In the end, it's monetizing data to help reduce their costs of labor and inventory. There's a lot of gold in the data."
