Maya Lombardi
Restaurant Tech Reporter
Maya covers the vendor side for Vibe Check and The Pass — the founders, fundraises, and product launches across the hospitality technology stack.
Before journalism she was the second hire at a reservations-AI startup that was acquired by a major POS company. She knows what a Series A pitch looks like from both sides of the table and has the receipts.
She also keeps the TableTransfers vendor directory current, which is how she ends up with most of the launch scoops.
More articles from Maya Lombardi
vibe check
·16 min read
Desk Review: Lightspeed Restaurant, the Quiet Half of the Duopoly
the pass
·5 min read
Toast joins Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2026 — and the narrative cycle just hit its peak
the pass
·4 min read
DoorDash Robotics Academy: Dot meets the K-12 STEM curriculum
the pass
·5 min read
Toast + Ike's Love & Sandwiches: 100 locations, and a sub-segment win that nobody else is talking about
the pass
·6 min read
Toast Drive-Thru ships: Delphi hardware + Incept AI + 55" confirmation screens, gated to 15+ unit chains
the pass
·4 min read
Starbucks ChatGPT beta: prompt-driven discovery, but the order still completes inside Starbucks
the pass
·5 min read
ConverseNow × Deliverect: voice AI gets wired into the order-management plumbing
the pass
·5 min read
Sierra Just Raised $950M at $15B. Every Hospitality CIO Should Reprice Their Voice-AI RFP
the pass
·6 min read
Toast Beat Earnings. The Stock Dropped 10%. The Market Wants ToastIQ to Pay
the pass
·5 min read
Airbnb Says Nearly 60% of Its Engineer-Authored Code Is Now AI-Written. F&B Should Care
the pass
·4 min read
Five Tech Predictions for 2026 — And Why Two of Them Are Already Wrong
the pass
·5 min read
Restaurant365's 2026 Survey: Sales Volume, Not Labor, Is Operators' Top Worry — for the First Time in Years
the pass
·6 min read
The Restaurant Tech Stories That Defined 2025 — and the One That Didn't Happen
the pass
·4 min read
Known Pivoted from 'AI Books Your Date a Restaurant' to 'AI Onboards You for Dating' — and It Says Something Important About the Voice-AI Wedge
the pass
·5 min read
Toast Crosses $2B ARR — And Tells Wall Street Toast IQ Is the Next Engine
the pass
·4 min read
Lightspeed Raises Outlook on European Hospitality and Outbound Sales Tripling
the pass
·5 min read
SoundHound's Restaurant Story Is Real: MOD, Habit, Red Lobster, Torchy's All Live
the pass
·5 min read
McDonald's Funded a $75M Q4 Value Push — and Quietly Raised the EVM Discount to 15%
the pass
·5 min read
SoundHound's CES Reveal Is Really an OpenTable Story
the pass
·6 min read
Square's Biggest Restaurant Launch Ever: Voice Ordering, AI Procurement, MarketMan Inventory
the pass
·5 min read
Square Brings Bitcoin Payments to Main Street — Zero Processing Fees Through 2026
the pass
·5 min read
Toast's Voice of the Restaurant Industry: 81% Expect to Use More AI, 40% Rank Profit #1
the pass
·5 min read
Lightspeed O-Series Turns iPhones into POS Terminals as Tap to Pay Rolls Out
the pass
·6 min read
Toast IQ Launches — a Conversational AI Assistant Across ~148,000 Locations
the pass
·5 min read
Mews Acquires DataChat to Seed an Agentic Hotel-AI Platform
the pass
·6 min read
Voice Goes Drive-Thru Native: Vox AI's $8.7M Seed and the 'No Human in the Loop' Bet
the pass
·4 min read
Loman AI Raises $3.5M. The 'Never Miss a Call' Thesis Just Got Cheaper to Underwrite.
the pass
·5 min read
Toast Goes Full Retailer: The Press Release Is About Inventory. The Story Is About Ads.
the pass
·5 min read
Toast Picks 14 of 20 Bon Appétit Best New Restaurants. The Marketing Flywheel Becomes a Moat.
the pass
·5 min read
Presto + ElevenLabs: The Brand-Voice Arms Race Comes to the Drive-Thru
the pass
·4 min read
Toast Changemakers: When a $150K Grant Program Is a Customer-Acquisition Channel
the pass
·4 min read
Lightspeed Names Google's Sameer Samat and Ex-ACI CEO Odilon Almeida to Its Board
the pass
·5 min read
Yelp's Quiet AI Year Is Suddenly Loud: Yelp Host Enters Live Tests
the pass
·5 min read
Digi Just Bought Jolt for $145.5M and Stitched IoT to Checklists
the pass
·5 min read
Chipotle's Quiet Kitchen Upgrade Is Shipping in 60 Stores — Here's the Spec
the pass
·5 min read
Vox AI's $8.7M Seed Is the European Answer to Drive-Thru Voice
the pass
·4 min read
The Drive-Thru AI Scoreboard at Midyear
the pass
·5 min read
Deloitte: AI Just Crossed From Pilot to Production in Restaurants
the pass
·4 min read
The McHire Morning-After: Hospitality CIOs Scramble to Audit AI Vendors
the pass
·5 min read
VoiceRun Raises $5.5M to Build the 'Coded, Validated' Voice Agent — Restaurant Tech Is the Wedge
the pass
·5 min read
Toast Go 3 Lands: Cellular, AI Upsells, and a Clear ToastIQ Bet
the pass
·5 min read
Toast's Marketing Stack vs. Resy's Loyalty Rails: Same Operator, Two Pitches
the pass
·5 min read
Canary Raises $80M, Stamps Itself the Hospitality-AI Default
the pass
·5 min read
Canary Layers AI on Sales & Catering — Where 25-50% of Full-Service Revenue Lives
the pass
·6 min read
Access Hospitality's Agentic Booking Engine and the End of the Form-Based Funnel
the pass
·5 min read
Toast Pushes ToastIQ Wins Into HITEC Week
the pass
·6 min read
Square AI Hits Open Beta — Block's Restaurant Bid Quietly Starts
the pass
·6 min read
DoorDash's SevenRooms Bet Finally Shows Up on the Earnings Deck
the pass
·6 min read
Toast Beat Earnings. The Stock Dropped 10%. The Market Wants ToastIQ to Pay
the pass
·5 min read
DoorDash's AI Merchant Tools: Item Description Generators and the Slow Merger of Marketplace and POS
the pass
·4 min read
Lunchbox Throws Free Middleware at the Third-Party Delivery Aggregation Problem
the pass
·5 min read
Olo Signs Chipotle Catering Pilot, Lake Street Raises PT — and the SaaS Market Remembers Olo Exists
the pass
·5 min read
PAR Technology's 2025 QSR Operational Index: Digital Orders Driving 8% Profit Gains
the pass
·6 min read
Yelp Ships AI Voice Agents for Restaurants and 15 Guest Manager Updates
the pass
·6 min read
Wingstop's Smart Kitchen Lands at 200+ Stores — and the In-House AI vs. Vendor AI Debate Just Got Concrete Numbers
the pass
·5 min read
Toast IQ Goes Multi-Unit — The Real Toast IQ Story Was Always Chains
the pass
·5 min read
SoundHound Drives Voice Ordering Off the Drive-Thru and Into Your Car
the pass
·7 min read
OpenTable Quietly Has the Most Interesting AI Strategy in Reservations
the pass
·6 min read
The OpenTable Squeeze, Heading Into Q4
the pass
·5 min read
Toast's Quiet January: Uber Radius, Reserve With Google Deposits
the pass
·6 min read
Bland AI Raises $40M. The Enterprise Voice Stack Just Got Funded.
the pass
·5 min read
Shake Shack's Margin Engine Finally Kicks In
the pass
·6 min read
Block's Restaurant Problem
the pass
·3 min read
Olo's New Sales Chief Was Hiding in Plain Sight
the pass
·5 min read
DoorDash's Record Quarter, Hidden Inside a $5B Day
the pass
·6 min read
Toast Lands Applebee's — the Biggest Deal in Its History
the pass
·4 min read
Sweetgreen's Traffic Problem
the pass
·4 min read
PAR Technology's Quiet $282M ARR Moment
the pass
·6 min read
Samsung and SoundHound Put a Burger King Drive-Thru in the Middle of Chicago
the pass
·5 min read
Lightspeed's Billion-Dollar Year, With a $556M Asterisk
the pass
·4 min read
Olo Heads to UBS — The Case for Digital Ordering as Critical Infrastructure
the pass
·4 min read
Kea Wants to Make Voice AI as Easy as Installing a POS App
the pass
·5 min read
The Drive-Thru AI Buyer's Checklist Heading Into Nvidia GTC
the pass
·7 min read
Yum and Nvidia Unveil the Biggest AI Partnership in QSR History
the pass
·5 min read
Tech Tracker: Inside the Next Generation of Restaurant Voice AI
the pass
·5 min read
Byte by Yum at 60% Digital Mix: Why Taco Bell's Tech Stack Is Now the Moat, Not the Menu
the pass
·5 min read
The Spyce sale wasn't a Sweetgreen story. It was a Wonder story.
the pass
·4 min read
PolyAI hires Gordon Ramsay — voice AI's celebrity-endorsement era arrives
the pass
·5 min read
Toast Q4: 30,000 net new locations, and Aman Narang names his AI moat
the pass
·6 min read
DoorDash Q4: Deliveroo and SevenRooms Are Integrated. 2026 EBITDA Guidance Is the Bill.
the pass
·4 min read
Olo under Thoma Bravo — and what restaurant-tech roll-up math looks like from the inside
the pass
·5 min read
AmEx merges Tock into Resy — and quietly flips on a Toast POS integration
the pass
·4 min read
The Reservation Wars, Mapped: What Each of the Three Stacks Actually Owns
the pass
·5 min read
Olo built the back end. Now it wants the front door.
vibe check
·17 min read
Desk Review: What Yelp's AI Stack Actually Does for Restaurants
the pass
·7 min read