Luke Fryer

Founder and CEO Harri

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Luke Fryer is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Harri, a human capital management and workforce management platform built specifically for hospitality and other service industries. Harri’s positioning rests on a claim about origin rather than technology: it describes itself as built by hospitality operators for hospitality operators, on the back of more than twenty years of first-hand quick-service restaurant experience, and Fryer’s own background includes a role at the restaurant group Wagamama. The distinction matters because frontline hospitality workforce problems, high turnover, fragmented shift scheduling, compliance exposure and hiring at volume, are poorly served by general-purpose HR software designed for salaried office employment. Fryer founded the company in 2011 and has built it into an international operation headquartered in Manhattan with offices in London, Hyderabad and Ramallah, reporting 60,000 customer locations and 6 million users on the platform.

Career Highlights

• Founded Harri in 2011 and has served as Chief Executive Officer since.
• Grew the platform to 60,000 customer locations and 6 million users, on the company’s own figures.
• Headquartered the business in Manhattan and built an international footprint spanning the United States, the United Kingdom, India and Palestine.
• Established an engineering and product organisation of more than 170 people in Ramallah, Palestine, an unusual choice of technical base for a New York company.
• Built a London office of more than 70 professionals and a team in Hyderabad, India.
• Founded the company explicitly on more than twenty years of first-hand quick-service restaurant operating experience rather than on outside-in software expertise.
• Built an executive team covering technology, product, finance, revenue and global marketing.

Professional Journey

Fryer came to software from hospitality operations rather than the reverse. His identifiable pre-Harri employment is at Wagamama, the restaurant group, and the company he went on to found rests its credibility on more than twenty years of direct quick-service restaurant experience among its founding team. That operating background shaped what Harri became. Hospitality workforce management is structurally different from conventional human resources: employment is hourly and high-churn, scheduling is volatile and constrained by demand forecasts, wage and hour compliance carries real legal exposure, and hiring happens continuously at volume rather than in planned cycles. Generic HR systems handle none of this well.

Harri was founded in 2011 to address that specific set of problems, and the product has grown into a full human capital management and workforce management platform for service-driven businesses, covering hiring, scheduling, engagement and compliance for frontline staff in restaurants, hotels and similar operators. The company’s argument to buyers is that profitability in hospitality is determined largely at the frontline, through labour cost, service quality and retention, and that a platform designed for that reality will outperform one adapted to it.

The business is now international in an unusual configuration. Its headquarters are in Manhattan, and it maintains a London office of more than 70 professionals and a team in Hyderabad, India, but its largest technical concentration is in Ramallah, Palestine, where more than 170 engineering and product staff work. Building a primary engineering organisation there is a deliberate and uncommon decision for a New York software company, and it is among the more distinctive features of how Fryer has built Harri. He reports 60,000 customer locations and 6 million platform users, and leads an executive team spanning technology, product, finance, revenue and global marketing.

Education

University of Technology Sydney

Bachelor of Business Administration, International Business. This is carried over from an earlier research pass and could not be re-confirmed; Harri’s own materials state no education for him.