Tech
Dinii, a cloud-based restaurant management platform, raises $45M Series B
Japan has always been a strong market for bringing technology into the experience of consuming food, and now one of the startups leading on this idea is attracting investors from across the ocean. Dinii, which lets diners order food from restaurants and shops through a mobile platform, has raised $48 million (7.46 billion JPY). Bessemer Venture Partners and Hillhouse Investment Management are leading the investment, with Ecelectic and Flight Deck Capital participating. Notably, this is the first time that Bessemer is investing in a startup in Japan.
Mao Yamada (CEO) and Kazuki Otomo (CTO) started Dinii in 2018 while still students at the University of Tokyo, after working part-time in restaurants to put themselves through school and realizing how outdated those restaurants’ order and delivery systems were.
Dinii originally made its mark as a B2B SaaS business: Circumventing the need for would-be restaurant customers — already operating on thin margins — to take on special devices or other equipment, the pair made a foothold in the market with a lower-cost, cloud-based point-of-sale platform that restaurants could use with whatever phones or other devices they already owned. Now Dinii wants to build on its traction by expanding the financial services it provides to its customers, Yamada told TechCrunch.
“Since we already have a cloud-based POS platform, we believe we will be able to expand to many more product services such as employee management, [restaurants] reservation, and [food] deliveries, and more,” he said.
Dinii was inspired by Toast, the cloud-based restaurant management system out of the U.S. that also started with POS and payment services (and also happens to have had Bessemer as an early backer). But Yamada says that he has yet to come across any company in Japan with capabilities (data and financial service for restaurants) similar to Dinii’s.
“Having been fortunate to be a key investor in Toast in the U.S., supporting it to become a $13 billion company, we see a similar element of success in Dinii: a strong team led by a young and visionary leader, a large underserved market, and the best all-in-one cloud-based solution,” Bryan Wu of Bessemer Venture Partners said. “We are confident that Dinii will emerge as one of the most prominent SaaS and fintech leaders in Japan.”
The Tokyo-based startup has a cashless payment solution, Dinii Payments, that it hopes to parlay into a bigger financial services product for its customers. “By first providing the cashless solutions, we can eventually move into back office operations, such as invoice settlement, inventory management, salary payouts,” said Yamada.
Another big focus will be services catering to the kinds of employees who tend to work in the restaurants on Dinii’s platform. A large proportion of them work part-time, Jorel Chan, chief of staff at Dinii, told TechCrunch. “They may be students who don’t really have stable jobs, and have poor credit scores, for example,” he said. “More often than not, they can’t wait until the end of the month to get their salary. They probably want daily payments. But there’s no ability to do that today.” One plan Dinii has is to introduce daily payouts for an additional fee.
Other areas it hopes to break into include insurance, asset management, and loans, to help restaurants manage cash flow and expand their operations.
Restaurant scene in Japan
Most restaurants in Japan mainly use on-site point-of-sale systems. In other words, traditional restaurants work with companies like Toshiba or NEC to rent an on-site POS system for basic operations. These can be costly and limited in their functionality and are not really set up for modern demands such as ordering from mobile apps, paying by QR codes, cashless payments, and cloud-based customer-relationship-management tools, Yamada said.
By putting the POS system on the cloud, Dinii’s customers — restaurants ranging from SMBs to large enterprises — can offer instant capabilities and gather customer data through mobile ordering. Dinii’s technology helps restaurant owners understand which menu items are popular and enables them to communicate with customers through a CRM (customer relationship management) system, send customized coupons to their consumers, and eventually increase revenues,” Yamada explained.
Dinii also leverages an integration with Line, the popular messaging app, which allows local restaurants to collect customer data such as favorite menu items, gender, last visit, and the number of visits.
The Japanese startup monetizes in two ways: by charging software subscription fees for its cloud-based POS system and fees for payments made through the cashless platform integrated into the POS system.
More than 900,000 restaurants are in Japan, and the food service market in the country is projected to increase to roughly $475 billion by 2030, up from $214.35 million in 2022. Dinii currently has around 3,000 restaurants across Japan, which is barely 0.5% penetration, so it has huge upside potential for this, Yamada noted.
“With more than 20 million [registered] users making food orders across over 3,000 restaurants, you can imagine how much traffic volume of data passes through Dinii’s platform every single second. Without revealing too much, we are currently building up capabilities for proprietary data solutions for restaurants that would help them in the future,” Yamada continued.
Expansion to Southeast Asia
The Tokyo startup also has operations in Osaka — covering the country’s two biggest markets for restaurants. But with the new capital, it plans to expand to other Japanese cities like Nagoya and to countries across Southeast Asia such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Dinii’s workforce has quadrupled from 30 employees in 2022 to 130, and it will also be hiring more as it grow geographically.
The startup has raised 8 billion JPY, equivalent to about $55 million, since its inception. Its previous investors include ANRI and Coral Capital.
Tech
Exclusive: Google deepens Thinking Machines Lab ties with new multi-billion-dollar deal
Former OpenAI executive Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has signed a new multi-billion-dollar agreement to expand its use of Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure, including systems powered by Nvidia’s latest GPUs, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The deal is valued in the single-digit billions, according to a source familiar with the matter, and includes access to Google’s latest AI systems built atop Nvidia’s new GB300 chips, alongside infrastructure services to support model training and deployment.
Google has been actively striking a number of cloud deals with AI developers as it aims to wrap together its AI computing offerings with other cloud services like storage, a Kubernetes engine, and Spanner, its database product. Earlier this month, Anthropic signed an agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of tensor processing unit (TPUs) capacity (these are Google’s custom-designed AI chips for machine learning workloads).
But the competition is fierce. Just this week, Anthropic also signed a new agreement with Amazon to secure up to 5 gigawatts of capacity for training and deploying Claude.
Earlier this year, Thinking Machines partnered with Nvidia in a deal that included an investment from the chipmaker. But this is the first time the lab has struck a deal with a cloud services provider. The deal is not exclusive, so Thinking Machines may use multiple cloud providers over time, but it’s still a sign that Google is looking to lock in fast-growing frontier labs early.
Murati left her job as OpenAI’s chief technologist and founded Thinking Machines in February 2025. The company, which soon afterwards raised a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation, has remained highly secretive, but launched its first product in October. Dubbed Tinker, it’s a tool that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models.
Wednesday’s deal provided some insight into what Thinking Machines is developing. In a press release, Google noted that it can support the startup’s reinforcement learning workloads, which Tinker’s architecture relies on. Reinforcement learning is a training approach that has underpinned recent breakthroughs at labs, including DeepMind and OpenAI, and the scale of the Google Cloud deal reflects how computationally expensive that work can get.
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Thinking Machines is among the first Google Cloud customers to access its GB300-powered systems, which offer a 2X improvement in training and serving speed compared to prior-generation GPUs, per Google.
“Google Cloud got us running at record speed with the reliability we demand,” Myle Ott, a founding researcher at Thinking Machines, said in a statement.
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Tech
The most interesting startups showcased at Google Cloud Next 2026
Google Cloud Next is taking place this week in Las Vegas, and one clear message has emerged: Google wants AI startups on its cloud. To that end, it made several startup-related announcements.
The most significant is that the tech giant has earmarked a new $750 million budget to help its Cloud partners sell more AI agents to enterprises. This funding is available to partners ranging from startups to the big consulting firms. It can be used for costs like Gemini proof-of-concept projects, Google forward-deployed engineers, cloud credits, and deployment rebates.
Google also highlighted a long list of startups that are using Google Cloud, either newly signed or expanding their footprint. Among them are a few standout names:
Lovable is expanding its use of Google Cloud by launching a new coding agent through Google’s enterprise app marketplace. Lovable is the fast-growing vibe coding startup and was on a $400 million ARR track as of February, it said.
Notion, Silicon Valley’s favorite AI-infused document productivity app, most recently valued at about $11 billion, is using Gemini models to power its text and image generation features.
Gamma, an AI-powered PowerPoint killer recently valued at a $2.1 billion valuation, is using Google’s state-of-the-art image model Nano Banana 2 and other Google Cloud features.
Inferact, the commercial inference startup from the creators of the popular open-source project vLLM, is accessing Nvidia’s GPUs through Google Cloud, in addition to using the tech giant’s AI stack.
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ComfyUI, the popular open-source tool for creating AI-generated images and multimedia, also offers access to Nano Banana 2 and is using other Cloud features.
Other startups that received the Google Cloud shout-out this year include:
ChorusView, which makes AI-powered smart tags that track the condition and movement of goods in real time.
Emergent AI, a vibe coding platform.
ExaCare AI, which makes AI software for post-acute medical care facilities.
Insilica, which creates AI-generated regulatory-compliant chemical safety reports.
Optii, which makes AI-enhanced hotel operations software.
Parallel AI, which builds web search and research APIs built for AI agents.
Proximal Health, which makes AI-powered software that automates the insurance claims adjudication process.
Reducto, which does AI-powered document parsing.
Stord, which handles e-commerce fulfillment and parcel operations.
Stylitics, which makes AI image generation software for retailers for tasks like outfit styling and product bundles.
Temporal, a developer cloud environment built to prevent failures.
Vapi, which makes dev tools for building conversational voice agents.
Vurvey Labs, which conducts synthetic market research via AI agents.
Wand, an in-game assistant for single-player PC games.
Watershed, which makes software that helps enterprises report on and manage sustainability programs.
ZenBusiness, an all-in-one back-office tool for small businesses that includes an AI chat assistant.
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Tech
Duolingo is now giving free users access to advanced learning content
Duolingo announced on Wednesday that its advanced language learning content is now available for free across nine languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Users can access this content through the web, iOS, and Android devices.
This advanced content is at the B2 level on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which is the international standard for language skills that schools and employers recognize. B2 level content refers to learning materials without translations, complex scenarios, and specialized vocabulary.
The new offering will include features like “Advanced Stories,” which helps with reading comprehension, and DuoRadio, a podcast-like audio experience for listening comprehension.
Now that Duolingo users can tap into this advanced learning content for free, they can level up their skills, whether that’s practicing for job interviews, prepping for studying abroad, or tackling complex news articles, films, and books without relying on translations.
The company says this positions it as the only free app to offer advanced-level learning across these nine languages at no cost. While competitors like Babbel and Busuu offer advanced courses, they typically require paid subscriptions. For instance, Busuu has some CEFR-aligned courses up to the B2 level, but the free version is pretty limited and doesn’t offer lessons like grammar explanations, so users need to pay for full access.
Previously, Duolingo only provided free courses that capped at A2 or B1 levels, mainly focusing on basic communication skills.
The company is positioning this free advanced learning offering as an enticing opportunity for job seekers, framing language learning as a practical pathway to improving employability in an increasingly global workforce.
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This comes at a time when the job market remains highly competitive and overall growth has slowed. Research from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages shows that learning a second language can raise someone’s employability by as much as 50%.
“Reaching job-ready proficiency in a new language used to be out of reach for most people,” Bozena Pajak, head of learning science at Duolingo, said in a statement. “It took years of expensive classes or immersive experiences that not everyone could access.”
Duolingo’s decision to offer advanced learning for free is also a strategy to increase its free user base. In its Q4 earnings report, the company stated that it has 52.7 million daily active users, demonstrating 30% growth compared to the previous year. This number is higher than its paid subscriber base, which stands at 12.2 million. However, Duolingo’s shares fell after the company projected that the year-over-year bookings growth rate for Q2 2026 is expected to experience a slight decline.
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