Rajat Suri’s Presto benefits from rising demand for automating restaurants
Rajat Suri, founder Presto
November 10, 2021
Presto announced today that it is going public at a valuation of about $1 billion. Based in Redwood City, California, around 250,000 of its systems are in use by several major restaurant chains, including McDonalds, to reduce labor costs and speed up operations.
Customers use Presto’s speech recognition systems to place orders and pay via a hand-held touch tablet. Using a few Presto cameras, restaurant managers can measure order flow and accuracy, identify bottlenecks and implement solutions.
Since the pandemic lockdown was lifted earlier this year, restaurant owners in the U.S. say their business has been hurt by an acute shortage of labor. This is not surprising, since they pay relatively low wages at a time when the overall economy faces a labor shortage. Former restaurant employees are moving into jobs at Starbucks, Amazon, Walmart and other companies which pay higher hourly wages as well as healthcare, education and other benefits.
Consequently, restaurant owners are eagerly looking for labor-saving technology-based solutions. This benefits companies like Presto whose digital products focus on solving "deep-rooted problems for our customers like the shortage of labor, slow guest experiences and lack of data to enable sophisticated decision-making," said Rajat Suri, founder and chief executive of Presto in a statement.
In 2020 as COVID-19 surged, Presto worked with volunteer groups to supply 20,000 smart devices to 2,000 hospitals and senior care facilities in the U.S. so that critically ill patients could communicate with loved ones during their last moments.
In 2008, Rajat (Raj) Suri, while a Ph.D student, got the idea to build Presto while trying to split a bill with his fellow graduate students from MIT and Harvard. To understand the restaurant business, he gave up his Ph.D. and spent a year as a waiter at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the MIT campus.
His first product was a pay-at-table device, which he tested with customers. Suri’s “idea was my first investment” - a $100,000 check, Krishna Gupta, founder and CEO of Remus Capital, a venture firm, writes in a company blog. “Our incubator/office space was The Asgard, the local pub next to MIT where Raj worked as a waiter and trialed the first versions of Presto’s technology.”
“Our journeys out of MIT are indelibly intertwined, and the work we did together in those early years was foundational for both of our firms,” writes Gupta in a Remus blog post. “Raj and I have lived a thousand lives in the intervening 13 years, but we are still both working just as hard as we did on the MIT campus and still chat nearly daily.”
Based in Boston, with offices in San Francisco and London, Remus was founded by Gupta, also in 2008, in a student residence hall while at MIT. Gupta received SB degrees in Materials Science and Engineering and Management Science from MIT. He graduated from Phillips Andover Academy, a private school near Boston.
Prior to Presto, Suri co-founded Zimride, now Lyft, the ride-sharing company with a market value of $18 billion. He holds a bachelors in chemical engineering and economics from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and also attended a Ph.D. / MBA program at MIT.
While at Waterloo, Suri founded and ran Forum for Independent Thought. The mandate of the student think tank, he told the University of Waterloo bulletin in June 2005, “is to tackle the world's most pressing problems by applying students' creative problem solving skills and critical thought processes…Where do we channel all the talent that we've worked all our lives to develop and hone? Is it to assignments, quizzes, labs, exams? To pick-up lines, drinking games, hotornot.com? Or is it to wonder which corporate tycoon to make richer in your next co-op term?” A major goal of the forum, Suri added “is to raise awareness of the poignant concerns of many of the unfortunate people around the world.”
Suri is a graduate of Thornlea, a government-run high school in Thornhill, a suburb of Toronto.
Ashish Gupta is Presto’s chief financial officer. He has raised capital as well as helped sell startups of various sizes. He has an MBA from Columbia University and engineering degrees from Caltech and University of Florida.
Presto will become public by merging with Ventoux CCM Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company. The deal is expected to close next year. At closing, Presto could get up to $223 million in cash. This includes $70 million of investments from Rajat Suri as well as Gupta’s Remus Capital and other investors. Remus is Presto’s largest shareholder. Presto plans to use the funds to further develop its technology, expand into new markets and build products for hotels and other adjacent markets.
On Twitter, where he has 3,200 followers Suri says, “As CEO, I get worried when I run out of things to worry about.”
