Curate Secures $10M to Enhance Mobile Ordering and Loyalty Platform in Hospitality

Los Angeles restaurants are tired. Not sleepy tired. Platform tired. The kind of tired that comes from paying a 25 percent toll to middlemen who own the guest, own the data, and smile while doing it. Curate Technologies showed up with a quieter flex and a sharper idea. If guests hate downloading another app, stop asking them to. Curate does not chase loyalty. Curate removes the friction that keeps loyalty from ever starting.

Founded in February 2021, Curate Technologies sits at the intersection of hospitality and instant software. Two Stanford trained engineers, Grant Russell and Alex Wang, started working on restaurant problems while they were still in school, watching operators drown in tools nobody loved using. Their answer was not another bloated system. It was instant mobile ordering and loyalty through Apple App Clips and Android Instant Apps. Scan. Tap. Order. No download. No patience test. The brand shows up fully formed, right when hunger makes decisions fast.

That insight just pulled in $10 million in new growth capital, announced January 28, 2026. The round was led by Kirk Brown, co founder and former Chief Executive Officer of DiscoverOrg, with institutional participation from K5 Global and individual backing from Amon-Ra St. Brown and Pieology founder Carl Cheng. No valuation talk. No noise. Just conviction around fixing a loyalty problem nobody else solved cleanly.

Curate’s numbers explain the confidence. Restaurants using the platform see commission free delivery orders triple within six months. Sixty percent of App Clip users later download the full app, a conversion rate most marketers would frame and hang. At Da Vien Coffee, four locations climbed to number seventy four in the App Store Food and Drink category within three months, while driving thirty percent year over year revenue growth. Loyalty members averaged 7.4 visits a year. At Mama Hieu’s, direct online sales jumped 44.3 percent after switching from Toast Online Ordering. That is not hype. That is margin coming back home.

The system works because it thinks like a host, not a spreadsheet. Curate’s AI engine reads behavior in real time, personalizes offers, automates marketing across SMS, email, and push, and learns without asking operators to babysit dashboards. For multi location brands, centralized analytics and controls turn chaos into signal, while commission free ordering cuts straight through delivery tax fatigue.

The leadership mix matters. Grant Russell brings machine learning depth. Alex Wang architects the intelligence under the hood. Howard Gordon, former Senior Vice President at The Cheesecake Factory who helped scale it past 150 locations, brings operator scar tissue and credibility. Jackson Long shapes strategy where product meets market. This is not software built in isolation. It is curated by people who lived the mess.

Curate is not trying to own the guest louder than everyone else. Curate is making ownership feel effortless. When loyalty stops feeling like work, behavior changes, margins breathe, and restaurants start acting like brands again. The question now is not whether guests will download another app. It is whether they ever needed to.