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    apps and an app

    Groovy new Houston-based app digitizes your restaurant dining experience

    Maurice Bobb, InnovationMap
    Dec 12, 2019 | 3:26 pm
    Roovy app Ken Bridge
    Houston-based Roovy Technologies has created a mobile app where people can control their dining experience completely from their phones.
    Photo courtesy of Roovy Technologies

    Imagine going into a popular restaurant, sitting down at an open table and controlling the entire dining experience from a smartphone.

    That's food, drinks, and even dessert all ordered and paid for on a phone.

    Prolific Houston-area restaurateur Ken Bridge had the vision to converge dining with technology by creating a digital solution to combat chronic wait times in restaurants.

    That vision became the Roovy Technologies mobile app, a platform designed to create the ultimate convenience for gastronauts everywhere.

    "Roovy was birthed out of frustration," says Bridge, the serial entrepreneur behind the Delicious Concepts restaurant group. "Years ago, we would typically have lines out the door, so I thought to myself, that with technology, there should be a way for a guest to come in and manage their experience entirely from their phone.

    "I felt like guests could go in, get sat at a table and order their food from their phone and pay from their phone and call it a day. That's how the idea of Roovy was conceived."

    Three years ago, after putting mock pages together, Bridge started attending South by Southwest Interactive in Austin for research and inspiration. That led to commissioning a local boutique development agency in Houston to build out Roovy's Minimum Viable Product or road map before creating a fully functional platform.

    "Roovy is a platform that allows the user to order and pay entirely from their phone," says Bridge. "We will soon be the first company to have all three categories of this type of app: dine-in, take out and delivery."

    Bridge deployed Roovy in his Japanese concept restaurant, Blackbird Izakaya, at 1221 W. 11th St. in The Heights several months ago to test out the app before rolling it out to several other restaurants.

    "It's a work in progress like everything else," says Bridge, who hopes for Roovy to be deployed in 20 restaurants very soon, then 40. "Everyday we're going to have issues that we need to resolve. But for now, we'll build it, we'll test it, we'll learn and we'll continue to go back and work out the kinks and keep pushing forward from there."

    Convenience — on both sides of the transaction
    For users, the value proposition is to be able to order and pay from their phone.

    "Even a really good server can be impeding at the same time, over-qualifying or checking too much on a table that it becomes a distraction," says Bridge. "With Roovy, when the user is ready to order they can. It's convenience-based technology."

    For operators, it streamlines the entire process, up to and including payment.

    "We built this as a native solution, so restaurants can technically operate their entire restaurant on one single iPad, while cutting out all hardware," says Bridge.

    The restaurant's menu is fully interactive and constantly updated in the app.

    When a user places an order, they can add notes to alert the kitchen or bar with their allergies or substitutions and the kitchen or bar receives the notice on the Kitchen Display Side.

    That order is then colored and timed, depending on the restaurant's flow and the user then receives a page when the order is ready.

    "When restaurant's not packed, they can prepare orders in four minutes, but when packed, it may take eight minutes," says Bridge. "So through the machine learning, they can input a flow time, but then the system intuitively will become more and more intelligent based on the number of tickets and how frequently the operator is stocking and selling a particular item."

    ---

    Continue reading this story on our sister site, InnovationMap.

    technologynews-you-can-eat
    news/innovation

    start me up

    Texas ranks near the top of best states for startups, study finds

    John Egan, InnovationMap
    May 12, 2025 | 1:30 pm

    Texas ranks third on a new list of the best states for investors and startups.

    Investment platform BrokerChooser weighed five factors to come up with its ranking:

    • 2024 Google search volume for terms related to investing
    • Number of investors
    • Number of businesses receiving investments in 2024
    • Total amount of capital invested in businesses in 2024
    • Percentage change in amount of investment from 2019 to 2024

    Based on those figures, provided mostly by Crunchbase, Texas sits at No. 3 on the list, behind No. 1 California and No. 2 New York.

    Especially noteworthy for Texas is its investment total for 2024: more than $164.5 billion. From 2019 to 2024, the state saw a 440 percent jump in business investments, according to BrokerChooser. The same percentages are 204 percent for California and 396 percent for New York.

    “There is definitely development and diversification in the American investment landscape, with impressive growth in areas that used to fly under the radar,” says Adam Nasli, head analyst at BrokerChooser.

    According to Crunchbase, funding for Texas startups is off to a strong start in 2025. In the first three months of this year, venture capital investors poured nearly $2.9 billion into Lone Star State companies, Crunchbase data shows. Crunchbase attributes that healthy dollar amount to “enthusiasm around cybersecurity, defense tech, robotics, and de-extincting mammoths.”

    During the first quarter of this year, roughly two-thirds of VC funding in Texas went to just five companies, says Crunchbase. Those companies are Austin-based Apptronik, Austin-based Colossal Biosciences, Dallas-based Island, Austin-based NinjaOne, and Austin-based Saronic.

    ---

    This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

    Houston Downtown modern business city with skyscraper city scape with park view from Buffalo Bayou center of Houston city, Texas, United States of America, US at sunset time
      
    Getty Images

    Texas remains a leading destination for startups.

    news/innovation
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