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DoorDash takes on Resy, OpenTable as restaurant reservation wars heat up

admin — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:00:58 +0000

Now available on your favorite food delivery app: restaurant reservations.

The still-simmering reservation wars of the last decade could fully reignite this year, as a shifting tech landscape pits some of the biggest players against each other to capture businesses and users alike. Reservation incumbents, delivery app newcomers and premium credit card partnerships are all ramping up the fight for a shrinking pool of diners.

Delivery giant DoorDash announced in June its $1.2 billion acquisition of SevenRooms, a reservation platform focused on direct bookings through a restaurant’s own website. Several months earlier, UberEats and Booking Holdings’ OpenTable announced a partnership to integrate reservations on Uber’s app. And in 2024, American Express, already the owner of Resy, bought Tock, a reservation platform focused on upscale restaurants, for $400 million.

“It’s three very large, very ambitious, very well-resourced companies all vying for the same exact piece of real estate, which is high-demand restaurants,” Resy and Eater founder Ben Leventhal told CNBC.

Resy was bought by AmEx in 2019, and today Leventhal — a strategic advisor for Resy until 2022 — focuses on Blackbird Labs, a loyalty program for independent restaurants that he founded that same year.

Bringing restaurants online

The reservation wars initially kicked off more than 10 years ago. Leventhal’s Resy burst onto the scene in 2014 and won market share, undercutting OpenTable’s legacy business, by charging eateries a simple monthly fee.

At the time, OpenTable, which was founded in 1998, charged restaurants both a monthly fee and a cover for each diner who booked through the platform. These days, the company still sometimes charges a variable cover fee for seated diners, depending on the establishment.

Thomas Barwick | Digitalvision | Getty Images

Despite Resy’s rise and buzzy partnerships with high-profile restaurants, OpenTable still significantly outstrips its rival by restaurant count.

Starting this summer, Resy will integrate the 5,000 eateries, bars and wineries that have listed on Tock onto its own platform, bringing its total number of venues to about 25,000. That’s still less than half of OpenTable’s roughly 60,000 restaurants.

But where OpenTable has scale, Resy has a “cool factor” and strong positioning in major cities, like New York, where dining out is big business.

And each companies’ relationships with credit card companies has added a new layer to the war, too.

Supercharging the platforms

Platinum American Express cardholders get special access to restaurant reservations at sought-after establishments, plus a $400 dining credit per year to use at Resy restaurants.

“We know that American Express card members spend close to $90 billion a year … on dining, and it’s a passion area for them,” Resy CEO Pablo Rivero told CNBC. “And we know that they also spend more. People with a Resy credit on an American Express card spend over 25% more on dining transactions.”

Likewise, eligible Visa and Chase cardholders get exclusive OpenTable reservations.

Those partnerships have also helped the legacy player woo some big-name restaurants away from Resy through cash incentives made possible by the credit card companies.

Recapturing top-tier restaurants with Michelin stars or James Beard awards has been a priority for OpenTable over the last five years, said OpenTable CEO Debby Soo.

“Credit card companies are looking for a perk to differentiate their cards, especially for their premium cardholders,” Soo said. “Especially after Covid, the experiential has become even more important.”

Delivery’s here

Now, DoorDash is entering the fray with its SevenRooms acquisition.

The company is used to fighting for market share in a competitive industry. Before the pandemic, DoorDash was up against UberEats and Grubhub for market dominance of online third-party food delivery.

As of 2025, DoorDash was the biggest player in the U.S. market, with about 67% share, according to digital restaurant operations firm Deliverect. UberEats trails with a 23% share.

Eric Baradat | AFP | Getty Images

As it enters the bookings game, DoorDash is looking to capture the range of dining possibilities, whether it’s delivery, takeout or table.

In the early months of its reservations integration, the platform was offering users DoorDash cash to use on future delivery orders for dining using the reservations feature. And in select cities, it offers exclusive tables at trendy spots for members of DashPass, its subscription service.

Above all, the integration with SevenRooms gives DoorDash and its restaurants access to more data about diners.

“Delivery and dine-in have typically been siloed data sets,” SevenRooms co-founder Joel Montaniel said. “So if a customer has ordered six times, and they’re coming into the restaurant for the first time, are they a first-time customer or a seventh-time customer?”

Following a diner across touchpoints means a better experience, and more tailored marketing, he said.

“We’re seeing the flywheel happening and the excitement about the DoorDash reservation marketplace happening, but it’s still early days,” said Parisa Sadrzadeh, vice president of strategy and operations for DoorDash. “We’ve got a lot of room to continue to grow.”

Correction: This story has been updated to correct that Ben Leventhal was a strategic advisor to Resy until 2022.

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Real estate startup Runwise is taking on record heat this summer

admin — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 15:01:04 +0000

Runwise co-founders (L-R) Jeff Carleton, Lee Hoffman and Mike Cook.

Courtesy of Runwise

A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

As brutally high temperatures bake the nation this summer, cooling is becoming increasingly critical across commercial real estate property portfolios. Landlords are balancing soaring demand with rising costs, putting energy efficiency front and center.

The trouble is that most large building systems essentially run blind. Temperatures are set centrally, so they don’t know if certain parts of the building are running too hot or too cold. That’s why so many office workers sit at their desks wearing sweaters in the summer and then feel overheated in the winter.

Now, new technology is taking on the challenge. Runwise, a New York-based technology company, invented its own hardware/software platform to eliminate overheating in large buildings. It recently expanded that to cooling.

“We’re trying to hit these climate goals, yet right in our literal building we’re throwing money away every time you run a boiler when it doesn’t need to run, you’re wasting money and you’re producing carbon emissions unnecessarily that really make nobody comfortable,” said Jeff Carleton, co-founder and CEO of Runwise.

The Runwise desktop app.

Courtesy of Runwise

The company combines future weather algorithms with a wireless temperature sensor network that speaks to a Runwise central control system. That control analyzes the data and then operates the system more efficiently.

For example, a 100,000-square-foot building may have just one boiler, but it needs multiple temperature inputs. Runwise would put in 20 to 25 sensors, which take an average based on the user setting and future weather, and then figure out how often to run the boiler.

The tech is now installed in more than 10,000 buildings across 10 states, with roughly 1,000 customers, including major real estate owner-operators such as Related, Equity Residential, FirstService Residential, MTA, Port Authority, National Grid, Rudin, LeFrak, UDR, Douglas Elliman and Akam. Runwise claims to have collectively saved more than $100 million in energy costs to date.

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The startup recently announced a $55 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures, bringing its total funding to $79 million. Other backers include Nuveen Real Estate, Munich Re Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Multiplier Capital, Soma Capital and Fifth Wall.

Carleton said Runwise will use the additional funding to grow the business nationwide and, of course, to incorporate artificial intelligence into its systems.

“It’s only going to become more and more ingrained in what we build, as we collect data from more and more buildings and build more advanced models on how to run them more efficiently,” he said. “We plan to use AI to continuously make our algorithms more efficient.”

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Amazon Web Services builds heat exchanger to cool Nvidia GPUs for AI

admin — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 05:26:17 +0000

The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.

Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.

Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.

Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.

“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”

Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.

Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.

Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.

Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.

WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

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The heat is on for newly confirmed SEC chairman Paul Atkins to crack down on Chinese companies

admin — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 05:14:03 +0000

Paul Atkins, President Trump’s nominee as the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, faced a key question just as he was to be grilled during his confirmation this past week.

Would the long-time securities lawyer and regulator investigate Chinese companies for what one senator believes are wanton and blatant violations of US disclosure laws that have gone unchecked for years?

Atkins said he would, which helped him squeeze by in the confirmation process with just 52 votes.

Paul Atkins takes part in a strategic and policy CEO discussion with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Eisenhower Execution Office Building in Washington, U.S., April 11, 2017. REUTERS

That exchange, between GOP Sen. Rick Scott from Florida and Atkins, hasn’t been reported, though The Post has learned that the usually mild-mannered Scott didn’t mince words with Atkins.

Scott said his confirmation vote was contingent on Atkins ramping up scrutiny on Chinese companies — “delisting” and removing those suspected of violating US laws from US exchanges — as soon as he got into office.

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The crackdown would be significant, probably one of the biggest the SEC has undertaken in its history. Nearly 300 Chinese companies, representing more than $1 trillion in market value, trade on US markets, namely the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Composite.

Many or maybe all of them, depending on whom you speak with, could be delisted.

The controversy over Chinese companies with public shares trading here has been brewing for years. Critics believe giving China access to our markets and public capital has fueled its quest for military and economic dominance. In 2020 during Trump’s first term, he signed into law provisions that give regulators the ability to delist China Inc. for violations of disclosure rules.

Among the concerns of lawmakers are that Chinese companies fail to properly account for Chinese Communist Party influence and ownership of their enterprises, and that they use slave labor of dissidents as part of their normal business operations. American investors in China Inc. will have little recourse if they are defrauded by a rouge nation.

Chinese flags fly above apartment buildings in Beijing on April 12, 2025. AFP via Getty Images

Biden’s roadblock

According to congressional sources, efforts to crack down on these alleged abuses were stymied by the Biden administration, namely its SEC chief, Gary Gensler, now a business professor at MIT. (Gensler didn’t respond to a request for comment.) The debate was largely confined to think tanks and the halls of Congress.

No longer. With Trump back in the White House, his trade war is heating up, with a particular emphasis on all things China. The delisting effort can now pick up steam.

Atkins, who must report not just to the president but a GOP-controlled Congress for oversight, will be under pressure by Scott & Co. to finally crack down.

These moves will put both major US exchanges in a tight spot, of course. The NYSE and the Nasdaq usually delist companies piecemeal when they fail to meet financial listing requirements or are indicted for fraud. Here they would be chopping out of their balance sheets major tech firms and retailers, such as Chinese online retailer Alibaba, that pay a lot of money to trade in the US and attract capital from our markets.

Paul Atkins during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, March 27, 2025. Bloomberg via Getty Images

It would be one of the most chaotic corporate actions the exchanges have ever undertaken, and you can’t say the exchanges shouldn’t have seen it coming. The NYSE listed Alibaba even as the once outspoken Jack Ma, its founder, came under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party. He seemingly disappeared from public view following some minor criticism he made about China’s bank regulations.

The listing ignored some interesting language in Alibaba’s “prospectus” (the official document for the IPO), which discloses “risks related to doing business in the People’s Republic of China,” where the “economy differs from the economies of most developed countries in many respects including the extent of government involvement . . .”

Here’s what may have caused blindness to all of the above: The NYSE charges as much as $500,000 plus various additional fees for companies like Alibaba (with a market cap of $250 billion). A US listing on the famed “Big Board” goes a long way in getting US investors to buy the stock, even as critics allege those shares finance the economic might of one of the most repressive regimes on Earth.

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A spokeswoman for the NYSE provided this explanation: “NYSE is obligated to be nondiscriminatory in the application of its SEC-approved listings standards.”

A press official for Alibaba didn’t return a request for comment. An SEC spokeswoman declined to comment.

The other big US exchange, the Nasdaq, also lusted for lucrative Chinese company listings, so much so that it carved out a loophole in its controversial and now defunct board-diversity rules. These rules prodded US companies to appoint a certain number of women, minorities and LGBTQ+ people to boards.

A screen displays the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other final trading numbers after the closing bell on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., April 11, 2025. REUTERS

It didn’t apply to China Inc. That’s right, no mandate from the Nasdaq to force Chinese-listed companies to appoint oppressed ethnic and religious minorities.

Nasdaq had no comment.

End ‘golden shares’

Again, all this might be changing thanks to Scott’s efforts. He believes US investors should know how their money is being used when they buy a Chinese stock, or an index fund that contains Chinese public companies. In addition to his pressuring of Atkins (who declined to comment), Scott’s been pushing legislation that would seek to end China Inc.’s use of so-called “golden shares.”

That’s a special type of stock held by the CCP that he believes gives it control over these companies outside of US disclosure rules, a charge Alibaba has faced in the past.

“Scott is obsessed with this issue,” said one person close to the senator.

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