Presto is a technology platform for the restaurant industry developed by Redwood City-based E la Carte. The company targets the customer-facing technology market for full-service and quick-service restaurants. Their products consist of

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...

, AI, tabletop tablets, and server tablets. As of October 2019, customers include

Applebee's Applebee's Restaurants LLC. is an American company that develops, franchises, and operates the Applebee's Neighborhood Grill + Bar restaurant chain. The Applebee's concept focuses on casual dining, with mainstream American dishes such as salads ...

Chili's Chili's Grill & Bar is an American casual dining restaurant chain. The company was founded by Larry Lavine in Texas in 1975 and is currently owned and operated by Brinker International. History Chili's first location, a converted postal statio ...

Outback Steakhouse Outback Steakhouse is an American chain of Australian-themed casual dining restaurants, serving American cuisine, based in Tampa, Florida. The chain has over 1,000 locations in 23 countries throughout North and South America, Asia, and Australia ...

Denny's Denny's (also known as Denny's Diner on some of the locations' signage) is an American table service diner-style restaurant chain. It operates over 1,700 restaurants in many countries. Description Originally opened as a Diner, coffee shop un ...

Checkers Checkers (American English), also known as draughts (; British English), is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve diagonal moves of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Checkers ...

, and

Red Lobster Red Lobster Hospitality LLC is an American casual dining restaurant chain headquartered in Orlando, Florida. The company has operations across most of the United States (including Puerto Rico, Guam) and Canada, as well as in China, Ecuador, Hong ...

History

Presto, then known by its legal name E la Carte, was founded by

Rajat Suri Rajat Suri is a Canadian-American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Presto. Education In 2007, Suri received a bachelor's in chemical engineering and economics from the University of Waterloo. He was a Ph.D./M.B.A. candidate at ...

in October 2008 in

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...

. Suri was a graduate student at MIT when he created the first E la Carte product, a tablet that allows restaurant customers to order and pay through a tablet. He left his graduate program to become a waiter in order to learn more about the restaurant industry. Previously, Suri was a cofounder of Zimride, now known as

Lyft Lyft, Inc. offers mobility as a service, ride-hailing, vehicles for hire, motorized scooters, a bicycle-sharing system, rental cars, and food delivery in the United States and select cities in Canada. Lyft sets fares, which vary using a dynamic ...

. E la Carte was accepted into Silicon Valley based seed accelerator

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...

in 2010. The same year, Suri moved to

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

and opened a

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was estab ...

office. E la Carte first installed its touchscreen tablets in restaurants in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

in 2011. The tablets could take orders, act as a

sommelier A sommelier ( or or ; ), or wine steward, is a trained and knowledgeable wine professional, normally working in fine restaurants, who specializes in all aspects of wine service as well as wine and food pairing. The role of the wine steward in hau ...

, receive payments, split bills, and calculate tips. In August 2011,

Lightbank Lightbank is a financial organization that specializes in making venture capital investments in "disruptive" technology companies in the United States including seed investments, Series A round and late-stage investments. It combines investment ...

invested $4 million in venture capital in E la Carte. In June 2013,

Intel Capital Intel Capital is a division of Intel Corporation, set up to manage corporate venture capital, global investment, mergers and acquisitions. Intel Capital makes equity investments in a range of technology startups and companies offering hardware, so ...

invested $13.5 million in Series B funding in E la Carte, with participation from Romulus Capital. Later that year, E la Carte relocated to a new office in

Redwood City Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California's Bay Area, approximately south of San Francisco, and northwest of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people to being a po ...

signed a deal with E la Carte to deploy 100,000 tableside tablets to its locations by the end of 2014. E la Carte rebranded to Presto in 2018. In 2019, Presto raised $30 million in growth financing led by

Recruit Holdings is a human resources Company (law), company headquartered in Japan. It was founded as "Daigaku Shimbun Koukokusha" in 1960 as an advertisement company that specialized in university newspapers. It owns the job search engine Indeed and the empl ...

and Romulus Capital to grow its AI platform. Presto began piloting its computer vision program called Presto Vision in October 2019. In November 2021, Presto announced a merger with Ventoux CCM Acquisition Corp. The company will be renamed Presto Technologies, Inc.

Products

The Presto platform operates on the

Android operating system Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open-source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android is developed by a consortium of deve ...

, and supports

EMV EMV is a payment method based on a technical standard for smart payment cards and for payment terminals and automated teller machines which can accept them. EMV stands for " Europay, Mastercard, and Visa", the three companies that created th ...

and mobile payment technologies. Presto's products include

, conversational AI voice ordering, AI, line-busting tablets, server handheld tablets, tabletop tablets for guests, and kiosks. With Presto systems, restaurants experience an increase in check sizes, turn tables at least 10 minutes faster, and increase tips by an average of 16%. In 2020, Presto began to offer a contactless dining system to restaurants in response to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

. The system enables restaurant customers to scan a

QR code A QR code (an initialism for quick response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that can contain information about th ...

with their phone in order to view the menu, place orders, and make payments. In August 2021, Presto launched its new voice capability . The system is powered by a set of highly accurate conversational artificial intelligence technologies. Presto introduced its all-in-one restaurant platform in September 2021 called Presto Flex.

References

{{reflist 2008 software