{"id":887424,"date":"2026-01-24T18:11:50","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T00:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/24\/inside-the-trend-of-tech-spinouts-solving-real-world-problems\/"},"modified":"2026-01-24T18:11:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T00:11:50","slug":"inside-the-trend-of-tech-spinouts-solving-real-world-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/24\/inside-the-trend-of-tech-spinouts-solving-real-world-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the trend of tech \u2018spinouts\u2019 solving real-world problems"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"content-header\">\n<h2>Technology companies churn out services for retail and hospitality businesses, but there are still problems to solve in these sectors, driving a trend for in-house software developments being \u2018spun out\u2019 <\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"content-center\">\n<ul>\n<li><i data-icon=\"1\"><\/i><\/li>\n<li><i data-icon=\"2\"><\/i><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div id=\"contributors-block\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.ttgtmedia.com\/rms\/computerweekly\/glynndavis_CW_contributor.jpg\" alt=\"Glynn Davis\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p><span>By<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.techtarget.com\/contributor\/Glynn-Davis\">Glynn Davis<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\n\tPublished: <span>23 Jan 2026<\/span>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<section id=\"content-body\">\n<p>Silicon Valley has created the impression of the archetypal technology company as founded by smart, young guns in a garage who tinker around to find a product that can make them, and their investors, a fortune. When things fail to work out, it is often down to the fact their creation failed to address a real-world problem.<\/p>\n<p>The opposite of such a scenario is when a business finds itself with a problem and, failing to identify an offering in the marketplace, develops one itself. The retail and hospitality industries have been hotbeds for such activity in recent years, no doubt driven by the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/feature\/How-retailers-are-using-digital-to-engage-with-Covid-Christmas-shoppers\">exponential increase in technology use<\/a> since the pandemic.<\/p>\n<p>The best products have then been \u201cspun out\u201d of the original operator businesses to then sell their capabilities to others in the sector who are encountering the same issues. Joel Robinson, founder of Openr, says that before it was a tech company, the firm started as a solution to a problem faced by the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/feature\/How-the-pandemic-accelerated-tech-adoption-in-hospitality\">Azzurri Group<\/a>, a leading hospitality operator with Zizzi, Ask Italian and Coco di Mama among its brands.<\/p>\n<p>Having joined the Azzurri Group in 2019 from the retail sector, working previously at Sainsbury\u2019s, Robinson encountered a growing digital landscape in hospitality involving a fragmented mess of scattered data, manual processes and inflexible systems.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were experiencing the pain,\u201d he says. \u201cIn 2017\/18, [hospitality] was a simple business involving configuring tills in restaurants and \u2018off you go\u2019. But post-pandemic, it was about order at the table, click and collect, website ordering and catering platforms. Managing identical data across these platforms was proving inefficient.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Having failed to find a market offering\u00a0that could truly solve its unique <a href=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/news\/252512402\/Retailers-mired-by-manual-data-integration\">needs of handling this data<\/a>, Robinson decided to build one. \u201cIf we felt we needed something then we\u2019d build it ourselves,\u201d he says. \u201cWe also spoke to peers to see if it was a sector-wide problem. Pubs, quick service restaurants and caf\u00e9s all had the same [data-related] problem, so we knew there was external consumption for the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Openr was built as a business to ultimately spin out, and obviously had the benefit of being prototyped within the Azzurri Group. This gave the product credibility and authenticity in the sector. \u201cWe could speak with empathy to others,\u201d says Robinson. \u201cThere are huge upsides to being a genuine solution for operators \u2026 and it opens doors.\u201d<\/p>\n<section data-menu-title=\"Development team\">\n<h2><i data-icon=\"1\"><\/i>Development team<\/h2>\n<p>Although Robinson had built up some decent tech chops, and his team had built its own click and collect \u2013 as well as pay-at-table \u2013 services, the Openr data platform required bringing in a development team with the capabilities to scale and bring to market. The company has since gone on to supply its offering to the likes of Stonegate, Caff\u00e9 Nero and Burger King.<\/p>\n<p>It has been a similar story for Andrew Xeni, co-founder of Nobody\u2019s Child and Fabacus, who gained experience in the retail and manufacturing sectors from working at his family\u2019s business, Europride Ltd, producing and supplying value womenswear to big high street retailers. During this time, he discovered the opportunities to create both the fashion brand Nobody\u2019s Child and tech business Fabacus.<\/p>\n<p>He describes the latter as a trusted system of record for the products of large brands and retailers. It comprises all the product data to meet companies\u2019 ESG reporting needs, and provides the infrastructure for implementing digital product passports.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI did a lot of the ground work early on, speaking with most of our then retail customers \u2013 including New Look and Asos \u2013 to build a product lifecycle management [platform] for the family business, but the data aggregation platform \u2013 Fabacus \u2013 was always intended for go-to-market [spin-out], as I realised it was solving a common problem,\u201d says Xeni.<\/p>\n<p>Having scanned the landscape, he discovered that no-one was addressing the fundamental challenge of siloed and fragmented data across products. With his fashion experience, he says: \u201cThe main ingredient I brought to the table was the business logic and understanding of the problem and the solution needed. Anyone can build technology, but it\u2019s like letting an architect build and decorate your home, expecting it to meet your needs.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Xeni says Fabacus was initially a passion project that he self-funded, but as he discovered the common challenges across the clothing sector, he needed to source external capital and sell the product to third parties.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s tough, so make sure you\u2019re addressing a real problem,\u201d he says. \u201cWe developed a solution architectured by a team of experienced execs that understood the problem intimately, and knew how to articulate the solution and plan an implementation succinctly. Nothing we have built to date is a challenge I haven\u2019t operationally faced in to personally.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Fabacus is currently working with a myriad of brands and retailers, including Nobody\u2019s Child, Paramount, NBC Universal, Hasbro, Fanatics and Tesco. Across brand licensing, Xeni says the business has reached a critical mass of customers, while in the retail sector, there is \u201cvery exciting early engagement\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Like Xeni and Robinson, there was recognition by JP Then, founder of Crosstown Doughnuts and Slerp, that fundamental change was happening to his business through structural change in the wider sector. As a very early user of Deliveroo and UberEats, he found a need for an e-commerce platform to host the growing volumes of online orders for his doughnuts.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI had 10 locations with click and collect and on-demand delivery, but they all had different attributes (such as opening times),\u201d he says. \u201cI did not want to build a platform \u2013 I wanted to find something, but there was nothing out there. Slerp was born out of my need to solve a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section data-menu-title=\"Separate business\">\n<h2><i data-icon=\"1\"><\/i>Separate business<\/h2>\n<p>During conversations with other operators in the sector, Then found they were also experiencing online sales growth, so there was recognition of the opportunity to ultimately sell his offering to others in the industry. He incorporated the business in 2016 because he understood being separate was important: \u201cA bakery running a tech company did not make sense!<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBy 2020, there was enough proof from Crosstown that it could be important enough for other companies [to use],\u201d he says. \u201cBy then there was also more sophistication in last mile logistics so Slerp could work with various delivery providers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The product gives hospitality companies greater control over their margins for delivery orders and ensures they have a direct relationship with the customer. This enables them to avoid having to rely wholly on the delivery marketplaces \u2013 Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats.<\/p>\n<p>As the delivery marketplace model has developed, the Slerp platform has ultimately been able to plug into the network of delivery riders at these companies while still owning the customer relationships and the associated data.<\/p>\n<p>Being an operator has been massively important for the development of Slerp, according to Then, who says: \u201cHaving operator domain knowledge has been pivotal to building out an operator-first view. Slerp solved a genuine operator problem.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He believes this is in contrast to the technology firms that find there is not a market for their products and make radical changes to their propositions \u2013 hence the frequent use of the term \u201cpivot\u201d in the tech world.<\/p>\n<p>Although Then left Crosstown in 2020, amid the tough times of Covid-19, he continues to run Slerp, which has gone on to work with many hospitality companies, including Nell\u2019s, Zia Lucia, Dom\u2019s Subs, Sourdough Sophia, Chicken Cottage and Chopstix.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section data-menu-title=\"Enterprise resource planing\">\n<h2><i data-icon=\"1\"><\/i>Enterprise resource planing<\/h2>\n<p>Ed Brown, co-founder of Double Puc and Percy Labs, is also aware of the tough nature of the hospitality industry. He co-founded healthy food chain Friska, which reached eight sites before it hit difficulties in 2021 and changed hands. During his time at Friska, he had created a dedicated enterprise resource planing system for hospitality \u2013 to handle the likes of purchasing, supply chain and ingredients \u2013 that was not tied into a point-of-sale system.<\/p>\n<p>This became RocketOS, and was an early product in the field as a software as-a-service offering for the hospitality industry. Brown now acknowledges it would have been a better business decision at the time to have focused on this technology and spun it out to sell to other operators rather than put more money into Friska.<\/p>\n<p>Armed with this experience, he now operates Double Puc Caf\u00e9 &#038; Catering \u2013 with four units in the Bristol area \u2013 along with the fledgling Percy Labs, an artificial intelligence-powered purchasing platform that consolidates baskets of product orders across wholesalers to save on the purchase cost, built with a view to spinning it out and selling it to other hospitality businesses.<\/p>\n<p>Although there are third-party group purchasing organisations acting as middlemen, Brown believes they do not benefit the hospitality companies nor the wholesalers. The advent of ChatGPT and its ability to accurately match food product data has enabled the creation of Percy Labs to provide a more efficient service that he says could save businesses 10% on their ingredients costs.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe know it is a challenge to build a product, but we\u2019ve done similar with RocketOS and Friska,\u201d he says. \u201cWe know that these solutions will be easy for operators to use. Every feature we build, we can see it\u2019s useful.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Building it from within Double Puc means the product can be prototyped very quickly. \u201cWe know how it needs to work. It\u2019s all customer-centric. Everything has been tested in a real environment,\u201d says Brown, adding that building the service in-house also helps with conversations with wholesalers and operators. \u201cComing from us builds trust and confidence,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n<p>As technology becomes an ever more important part of the operations of retail and hospitality businesses \u2013 and they have increasingly tech-literate workforces \u2013 the appetite for implementing real problem-solving products is likely to grow, thereby providing a fertile ground for in-house developments and potential spinouts.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"DigDeeperSplash\">\n<h4>\n\t\t\t<i data-icon=\"m\"><\/i>Read more on IT for retail and logistics<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li><a id=\"DigDeeperItem-1\" href=\"https:\/\/www.techtarget.com\/searchstorage\/news\/366637226\/Dell-PowerStore-adds-30-TB-QLC-drive-amid-market-supply-woes\"><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/rms\/onlineimages\/disaster_recovery_a267084312_searchsitetablet_520X173.jpg\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/rms\/onlineimages\/disaster_recovery_a267084312_searchsitetablet_520X173.jpg 960w,https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/rms\/onlineimages\/disaster_recovery_a267084312.jpg 1280w\" alt ><\/p>\n<h5>Dell PowerStore adds 30 TB QLC drive amid market supply woes<\/h5>\n<div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/rms\/onlineimages\/pariseau_beth.jpg\" alt=\"BethPariseau\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p><span>By: <span>Beth\u00a0Pariseau<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a id=\"DigDeeperItem-2\" href=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/news\/366614749\/Interview-Niall-Robinson-head-of-product-innovation-Met-Office\"><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/visuals\/ComputerWeekly\/Hero Images\/weather-storm-climage-change-MikeMareen-adobe_searchsitetablet_520X173.jpg\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/visuals\/ComputerWeekly\/Hero%20Images\/weather-storm-climage-change-MikeMareen-adobe_searchsitetablet_520X173.jpg 960w,https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/visuals\/ComputerWeekly\/Hero%20Images\/weather-storm-climage-change-MikeMareen-adobe.jpg 1280w\" alt ><\/p>\n<h5>Interview: Niall Robinson, head of product innovation, Met Office<\/h5>\n<div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/rms\/computerweekly\/Mark-Samuels-60px.jpg\" alt=\"MarkSamuels\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p><span>By: <span>Mark\u00a0Samuels<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a id=\"DigDeeperItem-3\" href=\"https:\/\/www.techtarget.com\/searchstorage\/tip\/Charge-trap-technology-advantages-for-3D-NAND-flash-drives\"><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/visuals\/searchManufacturingERP\/lean_software\/manufacturingerp_article_013_searchsitetablet_520X173.jpg\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/visuals\/searchManufacturingERP\/lean_software\/manufacturingerp_article_013_searchsitetablet_520X173.jpg 960w,https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/visuals\/searchManufacturingERP\/lean_software\/manufacturingerp_article_013.jpg 1280w\" alt ><\/p>\n<h5>Charge trap technology advantages for 3D NAND flash drives<\/h5>\n<div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/rms\/onlineImages\/sheldon_robert.jpg\" alt=\"RobertSheldon\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p><span>By: <span>Robert\u00a0Sheldon<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a id=\"DigDeeperItem-4\" href=\"https:\/\/www.techtarget.com\/searchhrsoftware\/podcast\/How-multi-tenant-SaaS-HR-unified-the-Hearst-conglomerate\"><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/rms\/onlineimages\/collab_a362306286_searchsitetablet_520X173.jpg\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/rms\/onlineimages\/collab_a362306286_searchsitetablet_520X173.jpg 960w,https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/rms\/onlineimages\/collab_a362306286.jpg 1280w\" alt ><\/p>\n<h5>How multi-tenant SaaS HR unified the Hearst conglomerate<\/h5>\n<div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/rms\/Search Site Images\/essex_david.jpg\" alt=\"DavidEssex\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p><span>By: <span>David\u00a0Essex<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.computerweekly.com\/feature\/Inside-the-trend-of-tech-spinouts-solving-real-world-problems\" class=\"button purchase\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Read More<\/a><br \/>\n Nancie Wrona<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Technology companies churn out services for retail and hospitality businesses, but there are still problems to solve in these sectors, driving a trend for in-house software developments being \u2018spun out\u2019 By Glynn Davis Published: 23 Jan 2026 Silicon Valley has created the impression of the archetypal technology company as founded by smart, young guns in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":887425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,46,26617],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-887424","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-inside","8":"category-technology","9":"category-trend"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/887425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}