Picture illustration by Nico Heins

Welcome to RB’s weekly roundup of the newest in cafe technological innovation. To get this and other tech news sent proper to your inbox every single Wednesday, simply click below.

Past week, Dublin-primarily based Flipdish turned the most current restaurant tech “unicorn” with a $100 million fundraise that set its valuation at more than $1 billion, the threshold for unicorn position in the startup world. 

It set up Flipdish as a major player in on the internet buying, but the company is far from just one of a type. It joins a significant group of identical firms jockeying to develop into restaurants’ company of option. They incorporate the big Toast, which turned a unicorn a long time in the past, as perfectly as additional modern upstarts like SpotOn. Snackpass, Popmenu and Mr Yum, though not however unicorns, have also obtained substantial funding in the earlier year.

So will there be sufficient dining establishments to go close to? In its IPO filing files, Toast mentioned its customers represented only 6% of the 860,000 restaurant destinations in the U.S. There is a great deal of ground left to cover. 

A fresh new $100 million ought to give Flipdish—which has functions below and abroad—a leg up. But the fight to earn those (primarily unbiased) U.S. places to eat might occur down to which supplier can provide the most applications in just one box. That is what has been driving a great deal of the consolidation we have found in cafe tech just lately, a craze that seems poised to go on as additional organizations start off heading immediately after the identical buyers.

Try to remember, numerous of restaurant tech’s 1st unicorns were third-get together delivery companies, which have undergone loads of consolidation of their personal in the past few several years. On line buying could be future.

The CEO of DoorDash is joining Meta’s board. The company previously recognised as Facebook final week declared it had added Tony Xu to its board of directors. “I’ve constantly considered it’s crucial to have fantastic tech leaders on our board,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated of the determination, adding that Xu will lend his viewpoint as the enterprise will work on establishing the metaverse—a a lot more immersive model of the internet.

Serve’s newest robots are fully autonomous. The robotic shipping organization announced…