Zhong Xu

Zhong Xu's public voice, across investor updates, interviews and podcast appearances, circles back constantly to one idea: infrastructure, not product, wins. He describes Deliverect not as a delivery app but as "the infrastructure digital food runs on" , the plumbing that turns "restaurant chaos into silent cash flow" ¹⁵. This is the throughline of everything else he says. Whether he is discussing the API connecting restaurants to Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat ¹⁶, the acquisition of Tobasco to extend from online into in-store ordering ¹⁷, or the SoundHound AI partnership automating voice ordering "from the moment a customer speaks to the moment the kitchen gets the ticket" , the framing is always the same: Deliverect exists to be the invisible system of record behind a restaurant's entire digital business, "their own apps, kiosks, web, first-party ordering, catering, 3pd marketplaces" .

On the mechanics of building a company, Xu is unusually direct about rejecting the founder mythology that the best product wins. He states plainly that "the only factor that will allow you to win is how big your distribution network is" ¹⁸, and describes how Deliverect got into 50 countries not by selling directly but by partnering with dozens of point-of-sale companies a month to distribute the software, a lesson he traces back to using the App Store as a distribution channel for iPad POS as early as 2010 ¹⁸. He frames this as a first-timer versus repeat-founder distinction: first-time founders obsess over product, second and third-time founders obsess over distribution ¹⁸. This same practical, almost engineering-minded approach shows up in how he talks about culture and management: "People think people management is fluid. No, you can engineer it" ¹⁸, and he insists culture has to be written down in handbooks and rituals before a company hits roughly 50 people, contrasting this with a previous company that waited until 100 employees and "never fixed it" ¹⁸.

Xu's account of scale is grounded in numbers he repeats and updates across interviews, tracking the company's growth almost like a running scoreboard: 40,000 restaurants across 40 markets ¹⁶, then 65,000 restaurants in 52 countries processing about 450 million orders a year ¹⁵, then 55,000 locations in 52 countries and nearly 800 million orders in 2024 ¹⁷, and finally 100,000+ customer locations with $15B+ in orders flowing through the platform, "roughly 7% of all food delivery outside China" . He is explicit, though, that the location count is not what he actually values: "the number I care about most isn't the location count, it's what those locations are turning us into" , namely brands adopting Deliverect as the backbone of their whole digital operation rather than a single channel tool. This mirrors a broader claim he makes about the industry itself, that digital sales have gone from about 10 percent of revenue for large QSR chains at Deliverect's founding to nearly 80 percent today ¹⁵, a shift he treats as existential for restaurants rather than incremental.

He is candid that this growth was neither linear nor comfortable. He describes COVID as compressing a decade of restaurant digitalization into 12 to 24 months, forcing a company that had planned to stay at 20-30 people to instead raise over $250 million and scale globally almost overnight ¹⁸. He is dismissive of the "overnight success" narrative generally, noting it typically takes a decade, and in his own case two decades of prior restaurant tech work, and he does not romanticize the early grind: "It's bloody tough, you know, I would not recommend it to anyone. The first year, year and a half, it's blood, sweat and tears" ¹⁸. His personal origin story reinforces this hands-on ethos, recalling how he started at 16 building "1,000 'ugly' websites for local Chinese restaurants" at his father's urging, then deliberately worked and waitered in restaurants because he "wanted to live it" before building technology for that world .

On fundraising and investor relations, Xu offers a specific, almost procedural playbook rather than platitudes: send monthly updates, good and bad, to a curated list of relevant investors, and after roughly 20 such emails demonstrating consistent momentum, "investors will knock on your door" ¹⁸. He pairs this with a sober view of when to raise at all, noting investors expect 10-100x returns and that liquidation preferences can leave founders with nothing even in a large exit if the math doesn't work ¹⁸. He is similarly unsentimental about what investors actually contribute, saying they bring "a little bit" of value, mostly network, hiring help and macro sensing, but struggle to tell operators what to do unless they've run companies themselves ¹⁸.

Geographically, Xu draws sharp contrasts based on direct deal experience. US enterprise contracts run to 5,000 locations because they span a continent rather than a country, "I signed enterprise chain, it's 5,000 locations, right, because it's over a continent instead of a country" ¹⁸, versus 250-500 location deals in Europe, and he notes American CEOs want to meet the founder personally even for midsize deals while European buyers are more number-driven and delegate to teams ¹⁸. He extends this to AI policy, criticizing Europe's approach as fragmented and overregulated, calling the Paris AI Summit "very France" rather than continental, in contrast to the US centralizing capital and China "doubling down massively when pushed" ¹⁸. On AI's effect on jobs, he doesn't hedge: developers should adopt it immediately because "it will take your job, so you better know how to use it and increase your productivity by two, three hundred percent" ¹⁸, while maintaining that AI itself is becoming commoditized and people and relationships remain the real differentiator in enterprise sales ¹⁸. This same appetite for AI shows up in product terms, where he celebrates the launch of "autonomous menu agents, smart assistant to automatically fixing your ordering errors dynamically" as just the beginning .

Underneath the operational detail, Xu returns repeatedly to a kind of relentless, almost moral framing of restaurants and effort. He calls restaurants "the glue of a society" ¹⁸, describes the "relentless, beautiful grind of the floor" he learned from the inside , and offers blunt exhortations that read as his personal operating philosophy: "Whatever you want to do, do it today. Don't do two weeks, don't wait for meetings, just make it happen" ¹⁸; "If you don't give up, you're going to win" ¹⁸; "Don't limit yourself in what you think you can't do. You have no idea what you actually can" ¹⁸; and "Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you land among the stars" ¹⁸. Taken together, his public statements consistently pair hard operational specifics, distribution economics, net retention above 120%, engineered culture, monthly investor updates, with an unguarded belief in speed, grit and scale as the real determinants of who wins in restaurant technology.