ZeroStorefront

Overview

ZeroStorefront (legal entity: Eatgeek Inc.) was a restaurant data and marketing automation platform founded around 2018–2019 by two former Grubhub insiders, Collin Wallace and Ashutosh Joshi. The company emerged from Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch with a clear thesis: restaurants were being kept data-blind by the third-party delivery platforms they depended on, and a unified data layer connecting their fragmented software stack could restore their ability to know and market directly to their own customers.

The company never raised enough capital to build a defensible, standalone business. With total disclosed funding between $225K and $450K across four rounds, ZeroStorefront remained a seven-person team for its entire independent life — too small to build the integrations, customer base, or proprietary data moat that would have made it difficult to replicate or bundle. When Thanx, a restaurant loyalty platform that was already an investor, acquired the company in April 2022, the deal validated the core insight while confirming that ZeroStorefront could not scale it alone.

Thanx's acquisition — its first in eleven years of operation — was framed as a strategic move to advance its "Loyalty 3.0" vision. Both founders joined Thanx post-close, with Wallace as VP of Insights and Joshi as Director of Engineering. Wallace departed roughly five months later to become Managing Director of Techstars, a transition that suggests the deal was structured more as an acqui-hire than a deep product integration.

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Founding Story

Collin Wallace and Ashutosh Joshi did not meet at a hackathon or through a mutual investor. They met inside Grubhub, where both spent years building the infrastructure that powers third-party food delivery — and where both developed a firsthand understanding of its most consequential structural flaw.

Wallace arrived at Grubhub through acquisition. In 2011, when he was 25, Grubhub bought FanGo, his food-ordering technology startup. ^[1] He stayed on as Head of Innovation, where he led the rollout of the tablet ordering systems that restaurants use to receive and process incoming delivery orders. ^[2] That role gave him an unusual vantage point: he was simultaneously building tools that made restaurants more dependent on Grubhub while watching those same restaurants lose visibility into who their customers actually were. Joshi, meanwhile, led engineering for restaurant-facing technology at Grubhub — the systems on the other side of the same interface. ^[3]

The insight that animated ZeroStorefront was not abstract. Wallace described it plainly: "The little-known secret is that the most valuable part of the delivery business is access to customer information, and that third-party operators had historically not been sharing that information with restaurant partners." ^[4] From inside Grubhub, he had watched this dynamic operate at scale. Restaurants were processing thousands of orders through Grubhub's tablets, but the customer identity data — names, contact information, order history, preferences — stayed with Grubhub. The restaurant knew the food left the kitchen. It did not know who ate it.

Wallace was not a first-time founder when he started ZeroStorefront. By his own account, he had built four companies, with three acquired — by Grubhub, EAT Club, and AmCoBi. ^[5] He was also a Techstars alumnus before going through Y Combinator, and later joined the Stanford GSB faculty to co-teach the Startup Garage class. ^[6] That track record gave the founding team unusual credibility in restaurant tech circles and likely helped them secure a diverse early investor base.