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It's more common today to see a restaurant closure than a new restaurant opening. It's the unfortunate state of the restaurant industry.

Fast food and fast casual chains often thrive in uncertain climates, but even that sector is having trouble adapting with the new digital reality that they now find themselves in. Sweetgreen, for example, now fulfills more digital orders than in-person orders. And chains like Starbucks have been making big changes to its business model to streamline operations and elevate the customer experience.

Pickpad is a B2B hardware and software solution that aims to bridge this divide, making digital orders more accurate and efficient to make customers happier and employees less overworked, ultimately making businesses more money.

Founded by engineer Yaro Tyshanenko in 2024 after fleeing his war-torn Ukraine and re-establishing himself in the US, Pickpad solves what he believes is a $40 billion problem.

While living in Chernihiv, Ukraine, north of Kyiv, Tyshanenko had been creating tech solutions for the restaurant industry for many years, including Ukrainian versions of delivery services like DoorDash. He would branch out based on the data collected from that service to create Ghost Kitchens in several cities to prepare food for those services. Russia surrounded his city on the very first day of the war, pivoting his businesses to deliver emergency aid before moving he and his family to Ireland.

After a year there, he settled down in Chicago, where he visited dozens of restaurants and coffee shops to find out what their biggest challenges were in terms of digital orders. "I was sitting with my stopwatch, taking notes, talking to every general manager," he says. "I noticed that there was a disconnection between physical and digital worlds in every store." He points to the covid pandemic as the turning point when they were no longer able to keep up with the demand. "Every year, billions of digital orders are still managed manually. It leads to problems with labor efficiency, order accuracy, and data accuracy... the number of caps will be unmanageable at some point."

He is targeting high-volume fast food, fast casual and beverage chains, which total about 400,000 locations nationwide. He has calculated that each of these stores loses about $100,000 every year in faulty digital orders.

Starbucks' recent changes include serving drinks in mugs for customers who are choosing to hang out at the cafe and re-implementing handwritten names on to-go cups. On those to-go cups, customers often have to put their hands on several cups to turn them over to find their name. Tyshanenko sees Starbucks as a prime customer who could benefit from Pickpad, especially as it aims to fulfill to-go orders in less than four minutes amid declining sales. "[Starbucks]

There are two sizes of Pickpad, one that's designed for coffee cups and small bags, and another that's designed for larger takeout orders. Each Pickpad contains weight sensors and, using AI, knows exactly how much the final order should weigh. If the employee fulfilling the order places it on the Pickpad and it does not weigh the proper amount, the pad will shine a red light indicating that something is incorrect. If it's good to go, it will turn green and the customer's name will pop up so that they know which order is theirs.

Pickpad is sleek on the surface. Depending on the restaurant's aesthetic, they can choose either a black glass or a faux wood surface. Each Pickpad sits flush together with a magnet so the business only needs to plug one of them in for them all to turn on, automatically sycing with each other. Setup takes just about 20 minutes and each store can do it quite easily on their own. It's all connected with wifi and there aren't any wires dangling around. Restaurants receive a pack of 10 pads at $9 per pad per month. Some opt to install them on shelves for an organized appeal.

Once it's installed, workers may never even realize that they're using Pickpad. Nor will customers. The point is just so operations run smoothly, customers receive their order on a clean pad that's customized to them, and restaurants can make changes that improve their bottom lines.

Restaurants that implement Pickpad do not need to worry about training employees on a new system. Pickpad integrates with a third party POS, or point of sale order processing system, like Square, Toast and Clover. "It doesn't replace any system. It doesn't change your processes. It doesn't change your store layout or design," Tyshanenko says. Once the order gets processed in the POS system, Pickpad takes a timestamp and adjusts the order status. The employee does not have to press any buttons. It is completely automated. "They talk to each other so it's working in the background and just helping you to be more focused on what matters."

Tyshanenko tells me more about how to-go order fulfillment teams often have a supervisor who oversees each order. "There's a person who is making drinks, but there's one more person who is double checking every order accuracy...there's a disconnect between the digital and physical at the most critical point within the customer journey," he says. Pickpad does this job for them so that those managers can accomplish their other important tasks. "We help restaurants skip six or seven steps for every order."

Pickpad is meant to make the entire production chain work quicker with a higher accuracy rate. "We can potentially save four to six hours daily for these people," he says. "They can be more focused on human directions and more important processes, quality of service and speed of service."

Employees do not need to press any buttons when an order is complete with Pickpad. They simply place the final product on the pad. Once it's placed, it automatically knows to alert the customer or delivery driver that the order is complete. "The reality is people just are not robots. They are overwhelmed with different processes," Tyshanenko says. "They just don't click these buttons because it's the last priority for them, meaning they are missing all of these crucial data points when order was on a shelf and when it was taken."

There's also a big disconnect around third-party delivery drivers, including those who work with Uber Eats, Doordash, Seamless and the like, and restaurants fulfilling orders that come in through those apps. From your pizza being cold when it arrives to an item missing, customers complain a lot about their delivery orders. "The biggest problem I heard from customers and from general managers is order accuracy," Tyshanenko says. "They don't have a lot of time. They don't double check order accuracy." Whether or not its warranted, its typically the restaurant, not the app, that ends up paying refunds for issues with an order.

Without any extra labor from employees, Pickpad tracks the entire lifecycle of the order, allowing the app to track down exactly where the error occured due to the constant timestamps. Now, if the delivery driver is the one who made the mistake, they will pay the refund, not the restaurant. Restaurants obviously favor this, but its actually beneficial for the delivery apps as well. "It's a great solution for both. [The apps] want to be able to reduce complaints," Tyshanenko says. "It's very much a sticking point between them and the restaurants. They wont argue as much anymore."

Delivery drivers also generally do not wait as long when Pickpad is implemented at the restaurant they'rep icking up an order from. "We save five minutes for customers and Uber. So we actually will be having Uber or DoorDash to fulfill orders faster," he says. "That five minutes could add up to millions of dollars across the network."

"You cannot improve something that you cannot measure," says Tyshanenko.

Where restaurants can really thrive in the long term with Pickpad is with all of the data it collects about digital orders for better cost efficiency. "They don't have the exact data points when the order was ready, when it was completed. So they cannot calculate what their average preparation time on Friday night is compared to Monday morning," he says. "Most don't have an idea on the average customer waiting time."

Happier customers also means return customers. "The restaurant industry has 30% retention rate," Tyshanenko says. "We are helping restaurants not to lose their sense of hospitality, creating this personalized customer experience."

Pickpad takes advantage of this data collection by using AI to better understand customer habits. "By learning about previous order history we can start to recognize patterns better using machine learning and we can increase the order accuracy prediction," Tyshanenko says.

Pickpad was honored at CES 2025 with a prestigious Innovation Award in the Artificial Intelligence category.

Shortly before that, Pickpad raised $200,000 from Antler to kickstart the hardware and software development and initiate pilot programs. "I'm making everything in my apartment," Tyshanenko says. "I have three 3D printers. I'm wiring, soldering, assembling everything in-house." His goal is to be able to mass manufacture the Pickpads soon once he has more clients.

There are currently two pilot programs in place in Chicago with several more brands totalling hundreds of stores confirming their interest in implementing Pickpad too, including a popular healthy lifestyle chain.

One of the pilot programs is Chicago's Soloway Coffee, which implemented Pickpad in its cafe earlier this year. "We always look for efficient solutions for our customers and we always try to treat our customers in a unique way with our products and service," Soloway owner Artur Yuzvik says. "We have had an increase of delivery experience satisfaction from the customers."

It's going so well for Soloway that the cafe is already planning to implement Pickpad in its upcoming second location, which is a more formal restaurant and not just a cafe, which can also greatly benefit from Pickpad even though its not Tyshanenko's core customer. "We are at least 50% quicker than before. We don't do some things that we used to do so orders are being done the same way but we mark it as complete very quickly," Yuzvik says. "Based on the first four weeks, sales went from somewhere between three and a half to five times more...in the last four months we had only one or two mistakes which is a great example of the accuracy."

Tyshanenko feels grateful to be in the United States to continue using his engineering expertise to create pathways that improve the lives of others. "Obstacle and challenges push your limits. You can leverage this superpower to be even better in the future," he says. "My mission is just to create new products for millions of people. I love to see how these products are making their lives a little bit better."