Resy
“Can a restaurant reservation platform become the dining OS for American Express cardholders while staying an unlicensed layer on top of third-party payments?”
Founded2014
HQNew York, NY, USA
FoundersBen Leventhal, Gary Vaynerchuk, Michael Montero
Total raised$15.8M (pre-acquisition)
Latest roundAcquired by American Express (2019)
IndustryVertical SaaS / Restaurants
The story
Resy started in 2014 as a paid-reservation app taking a fee to sell hot tables, then pivoted to a full restaurant SaaS platform (reservations, table management, event ticketing) competing directly with OpenTable. American Express acquired it in 2019 and turned it into a dining-benefits engine for cardholders. Its embedded finance layer is deliberately thin: Stripe handles all restaurant payouts and prepayments, and Rooam powers Resy Pay for diner-side check payment — Resy itself takes no direct financial licensing risk.
Product timeline
2014
Founded in NYC as a paid-reservation booking app to challenge OpenTable· launch
2017
Series A led by Airbnb; commercial partnership integrating Resy into Airbnb Trips· funding
2019
Acquired by American Express to power dining benefits for cardholders· acquisition
2022
Launched Resy Pay in the US — QR-based mobile payment tool powered by Rooam, integrated with Amex Membership Rewards· payments
2026
Launched integrations with Anthropic Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT to surface reservation availability via conversational AI· ai
The stack
2 layers disclosed in Resy’s embedded-finance stack
Payments / PSP
Accounting
in the full report
Accounting gap: minor
13 more providers across 1 layer, with confidence-scored evidence and source URLs, are in the Embedded Finance Index report.