By Benjamin Dada
A busy restaurant is not always a profitable one. Somewhere between the bustling dining rooms, the constant arrival of delivery orders and the daily movement of money, there is an entire world of financial calculations that can determine whether a hospitality business survives another year. And for many independent operators, understanding these calculations can be as demanding as running the business itself.

It is within this complicated commercial landscape that Victoria Olukotun has found an interesting calling.

The UK-based technology entrepreneur is the founder and product lead of RestroIQ, a digital platform designed to help restaurants, cafés and takeaway businesses understand the financial implications of their decisions. Her work is concerned with a familiar problem in modern entrepreneurship: business owners may have access to considerable amounts of information without necessarily possessing the analytical resources to make effective use of it.

For Olukotun, the solution begins with rethinking how financial technology communicates with its users.
Her journey into digital product innovation draws from years of experience in commercial banking, business development and digital transformation. Before founding RestroIQ, she served as Country Head of Retail Banking at UBA Sierra Leone, where she worked across retail banking operations, digital onboarding and service improvement initiatives.

It was a professional environment that required an understanding of how financial services interact with customer behaviour, operational systems and commercial performance.
Today, those experiences inform her approach to developing technology for smaller businesses.

Understanding the Numbers
There is a peculiar complexity to the economics of hospitality. A restaurant might experience a surge in customer orders and still discover that its profit margins are shrinking. Rising food costs, staffing expenses, delivery commissions and other operating costs can gradually erode the financial benefits of increased sales.

For entrepreneurs without dedicated financial advisers, identifying these pressures and understanding their implications can be particularly difficult.
RestroIQ was conceived to address this challenge.

Rather than functioning primarily as a conventional sales-monitoring dashboard, the platform allows users to begin with a specific commercial decision.

A restaurant owner considering a price increase, for instance, can explore how changes in pricing might affect revenue and profitability under different assumptions.
Another operator contemplating delivery services can assess projected sales against additional expenses, including commissions, packaging and food costs.

The resulting analysis provides an estimate of the financial implications of the proposed action.
This approach is central to Olukotun’s product philosophy. By making the decision itself the starting point, she has sought to make financial analysis less intimidating for entrepreneurs who are already preoccupied with the demands of running their businesses.

Her contribution has involved defining the product’s commercial requirements, shaping its financial decision pathways and overseeing their translation into software functionality.

The platform also incorporates scenario modelling, break-even analysis and AI-assisted explanations.
These capabilities are designed to help operators understand how different assumptions might influence their financial position.

An important aspect of the technology is the distinction between its calculations and its artificial intelligence features.

RestroIQ generates financial estimates using defined mathematical processes based on information supplied by the user. Its AI-supported functionality helps interpret those calculations and communicate their implications in more accessible language.

This distinction is especially relevant in an era when artificial intelligence is frequently presented as a universal solution to complicated business problems.
The usefulness of any financial recommendation still depends on the quality of the underlying information.

Learning From the People Who Use It
For Olukotun, one of the challenges of developing RestroIQ has been understanding how hospitality entrepreneurs interact with financial technology.

A software application might be capable of producing elaborate calculations, but its usefulness becomes questionable when users struggle to understand the information required to operate it.

During early testing, some users reportedly encountered difficulties with financial terminology and certain data-entry requirements.

The feedback prompted changes to the platform’s design.
Olukotun prioritised clearer explanations, more accessible language and additional guidance around the information users needed to provide.

These adjustments reflect the practical demands of developing technology for people whose expertise may lie in cooking, customer service, restaurant management or entrepreneurship rather than accounting.

They also reveal something about the relationship between technical sophistication and accessibility.
For a product like RestroIQ, the challenge is to preserve the substance of financial analysis while making its processes understandable to users with different levels of commercial experience.

This has informed the platform’s guided assessment system, which attempts to connect the information requested from business owners with the financial decisions they are trying to evaluate.

In this respect, Olukotun’s work belongs to a wider conversation about the democratisation of business intelligence.

Smaller enterprises increasingly rely on digital technologies for payments, customer engagement and daily operations. Yet, access to software does not automatically translate into stronger financial planning.
The ability to interpret business information remains an important part of the equation.

The Entrepreneur Behind the Technology
Olukotun’s professional background provides some context for her interest in this problem.
Her experience in retail banking exposed her to the relationship between financial systems, customer needs and operational efficiency.

She subsequently developed her expertise in business strategy and data analytics, earning an MBA and an MSc in International Business with Data Analytics, the latter awarded with distinction.
She also holds professional certifications in Scrum, Product Ownership and Kanban.

These experiences have informed her responsibilities at RestroIQ, where she leads product strategy and works with development support to translate commercial requirements into a functioning digital application.

Her work has required decisions about which financial problems the platform should address, how users should interact with its features and how analytical results should be presented.
The development of its delivery profitability pathway offers an illustration.

Introducing delivery can appear commercially attractive to a restaurant seeking additional revenue.

However, the financial consequences depend on several variables, including commission charges, packaging costs, food expenditure and the relationship between additional sales and existing operating expenses.

RestroIQ’s assessment process attempts to bring these considerations into a single decision journey.

The objective is to help operators examine whether a proposed change is financially viable under the assumptions they provide.

It is a practical application of financial modelling, presented through software designed for users who may not ordinarily undertake such calculations independently.

The Reality of Building a Technology Company
As with many emerging digital products, RestroIQ’s development has been accompanied by the challenge of establishing its relevance in the market.

By early October 2026, the company reported 39 registered users across its Free and Pro subscription plans.

It had also recorded successful subscription transactions, indicating that some users had progressed beyond registration to paid engagement.

For an early-stage technology company, these developments represent initial commercial activity.
However, the platform has yet to establish the scale of adoption or independently measured financial outcomes that would demonstrate its broader impact on the hospitality industry.

That distinction is important.

RestroIQ’s proposition is based on helping business owners make better-informed decisions. Establishing whether those decisions translate into improved profitability will require further evidence from users over time.

The company has engaged hospitality-sector participants during product feedback and validation, and Olukotun has used the resulting observations to guide improvements.

Its future development plans include integrations with point-of-sale and accounting systems, which could reduce manual data entry and provide more consistent financial information.

There are also ambitions to expand the platform’s analytical capabilities and explore opportunities beyond its initial market.

For now, these remain areas of planned development.

Beyond the Dashboard
There is a broader significance to the kind of problem Olukotun is attempting to solve.

For many small businesses, financial decision-making remains deeply personal. An unsuccessful expansion, poorly calculated pricing strategy or expensive operational change can have consequences that extend beyond a company’s balance sheet.

Unlike larger corporations, independent operators may have limited financial reserves and fewer opportunities to absorb costly mistakes.

Technology cannot eliminate these risks. Neither can a financial projection guarantee the success of a commercial decision.

What it can potentially offer is a more structured way of examining the available information before a decision is made.

This is the proposition around which Olukotun has built RestroIQ.

Her work combines commercial experience with digital product development, applying financial analysis to situations familiar to independent hospitality entrepreneurs.

The company’s early progress demonstrates that the concept has moved beyond an initial idea into an operational software product, although its longer-term commercial impact remains to be established.

For Olukotun, the next stage will involve strengthening that evidence while continuing to refine the technology.

And in an industry where a full restaurant can sometimes conceal a struggling business, the ability to understand what the numbers actually mean may prove to be one of the more useful applications of digital innovation.