Shiva Srinivasan

Founder & CEO Zuppler

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Shiva Srinivasan co-founded Zuppler in November 2009, before third-party delivery marketplaces reshaped the economics of restaurant ordering, and has run it as chief executive ever since. Zuppler’s proposition has been consistent through that upheaval: the ordering experience should carry the operator’s brand, not an aggregator’s. Its Menu Anywhere platform is white-label — a restaurant, caterer, grocer, university, hospital, hotel or stadium runs ordering on its own site and app, keeps the customer data and the direct relationship, and pays software fees rather than marketplace commissions. That positioning became considerably more valuable once operators discovered what third-party commissions did to their margins. The company is headquartered in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, with offices in Romania, India and Mexico, serves customers across the US, Canada, Europe and the Middle East, and moved into delivery dispatch by acquiring DataDreamers after an initial partnership.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Zuppler in November 2009 with Iulian Costan and Petrica Ghiurca; chief executive throughout, with Ghiurca as chief technology officer.
• Built Menu Anywhere into a white-label digital ordering platform spanning restaurants, caterers, groceries, convenience stores, universities, hospitals, hotels, sports stadiums and delivery services.
• Partnered with DataDreamers in May 2022 to combine Zuppler’s ordering front end with dispatch and driver-management technology, then acquired the company, announcing the completed integration in February 2024.
• Migrated the combined platform to AWS for high availability and built direct integrations with cloud POS systems and with Checkmate, Chowly and Otter.
• Extended the product beyond ordering into catering, loyalty, marketing automation, gift cards and AI-driven upselling.
• Ran a distributed engineering and operations organisation across Pennsylvania, Romania, India and Mexico.
• Waived six months of fees for restaurant customers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professional Journey

Srinivasan started Zuppler in 2009 with two co-founders, Iulian Costan and Petrica Ghiurca, around an unglamorous but real problem: restaurant ordering menus online were ugly, slow and badly structured, and most independent operators had no realistic way to fix that. The company’s early framing was that it existed to beautify online ordering menus. Ghiurca took the technical leadership, and the engineering base in Romania reflects the founding team’s composition.

The business matured into something broader than menus. Zuppler built a white-label ordering platform that operators deploy under their own branding, extending well past restaurants into institutional foodservice — universities, hospitals, hotels and stadiums, where the ordering experience must integrate with existing operations rather than replace them. Through the 2010s the company added catering workflows, loyalty, marketing automation and gift cards, so that the platform covered the commercial layer around the order rather than only the transaction.

The rise of third-party delivery marketplaces during the same period was both the main competitive threat and Zuppler’s best argument. Srinivasan’s public commentary during this stretch focused on conversion and cart abandonment in food ordering, and on operators’ need to own their customer data. When COVID-19 closed dining rooms, Zuppler gave its restaurant customers six months of free service.

The company’s most significant structural move came in the delivery layer. Having announced a strategic partnership with DataDreamers in May 2022 aimed at the roughly $80 billion delivery market — pairing Zuppler’s consumer ordering experience with DataDreamers’ dispatch and driver technology — Zuppler went on to acquire the company outright, announcing the completed platform integration in February 2024. The combined product targets restaurant delivery services that want to compete with the large aggregators directly, and it brought an AWS migration and direct cloud POS integrations with it.

Education

Drexel University

Computer Science

R.V. College of Engineering

Computer Science