TECHNOLOGY
WHY THIS POS COMPANY BELIEVES IT CAN DOMINATE THE MARKET FOR ASIAN RESTAURANTS Tech Check: Chowbus has won over thousands of Asian operators by offering tech that speaks their language, literally. It just raised $81 million to keep expanding.
M any big restaurant point-of-sale companies could be considered generalists. Whether a restaurant is a taco place, coffee shop or pizza parlor, they probably view it as a potential customer. Chowbus, on the other hand, has always been a specialist. Its technology is designed specifically for Asian concepts, which make up a significant and fast-growing chunk of the restaurant industry. This targeted strategy has paid off. Chowbus’ annual recurring revenue has increased by 900% over the past four years, to more than $120 million, and it just raised $81 million to keep expanding. “Now if you go to a Chinatown, probably 70% of restaurants are using us,” said CEO Linxin Wen in an interview. Wen came to the U.S. from China in 2013 to get his masters degree in business. After graduating, he and co-founder Suyu Zhang wanted to start a business that would help immigrants, and they decided on the emerging sector of restaurant delivery. Initially, Chowbus helped mom-and-pop Asian restaurants with the basics, like taking high-quality photos of their food for the web. It later began offering third-party delivery services, focusing on markets dense with Asian concepts. It grew quickly enough to land a $33 million Series A round in June 2020, the thick of the pandemic. But it soon found that in order to compete with larger competitors like DoorDash, it would need to ask restaurants for higher commissions and promotional spending, which it didn’t want to do. Wen had also noticed that most of its customers were using older POS systems, and believed Chowbus could offer them more modern technology that was tailored to their needs. Chowbus launched that in 2022, and in 2024, it got out of the delivery business and made the POS its sole focus. The Asian restaurant market is diverse. It encompasses more than 30 cuisine types, Wen said, from sushi to Korean barbecue, Chinese buffets and boba tea, each with a unique service model. “Each cuisine type has their own operational nuance in terms of how they order the food, how they send it to the kitchen and how they calculate employees’ salary,” Wen said. “The reason we’ve found success in this vertical is we understand them the most and we built the best product for them.”
JOE GUSZKOWSKI
JOSEPH.GUSZKOWSKI@INFORMA.COM
38
RESTAURANT BUSINESS APRIL 2026
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