Meals provide chains are notoriously messy. Orders arrive by means of completely different channels, workers spend hours manually coming into them into clunky enterprise software program programs, and compliance usually relies on spreadsheets.
For many years, software program distributors have tried, with combined success, to modernize the workflows behind the worldwide motion of perishable items.
Now, a Y Combinator startup known as Burnt thinks AI brokers — software program that may mechanically deal with duties usually accomplished by people — can succeed the place conventional enterprise software program hasn’t within the trillion-dollar U.S. meals market.
The corporate, which automates back-office provide chain duties with AI, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding led by Penny Jar Capital, the enterprise agency backed by NBA star Steph Curry, with participation from Scribble Ventures, Formation VC, and angel buyers, together with Dan Scheinman.
Burnt co-founder and CEO Joseph Jacob grew up round meals factories. He says his great-grandfather was the primary to export shrimp from India to the U.S. within the Nineteen Thirties. Since then, every era of his household has labored someplace alongside the seafood provide chain, together with farming, processing, exporting, and importing.
Jacob moved to India throughout his youth and, after faculty, labored on the manufacturing facility ground of a shrimp processor in a rural space. The expertise launched him to the intricacies of the meals and restaurant enterprise.
When he returned to the U.S. and started managing massive volumes of seafood imports, he seen main inefficiencies.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
“I ended up shopping for a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of kilos of seafood, however all the things was tracked on Excel sheets and a 20-year-old ERP system,” Jacob instructed iinfoai. “In a enterprise with razor-thin margins, it’s practically inconceivable to succeed with out good provide chain administration. We went by means of a number of software program implementations, however two rollouts failed. That’s after I realized I needed to construct software program for this trade, not simply work in it.”
Jacob’s expertise isn’t an remoted one. Enterprise distributors have lengthy tried to promote distributors on massive rollouts that drag on for years, price hundreds of thousands, and frustrate the small and mid-sized gamers that dominate the market.
After 20 years of missed software program adoption within the trade, Jacob believes Burnt’s method of layering AI brokers on high of present programs reasonably than changing them represents an enormous alternative.
“Everybody we speak to calls their ERP a mandatory evil,” stated the chief govt. “Conventional software program pressured groups to tear out outdated processes and undertake new ones. With AI, you don’t want to alter the method; you simply get the work accomplished.”
Right here’s how issues are inclined to work right now: Gross sales reps at meals distributors obtain orders by way of electronic mail, cellphone calls, WhatsApp, voicemails, texts, and even faxes. Every order then needs to be keyed in manually. Whereas crucial, the method eats up hours that may very well be spent on higher-value work like successful new prospects or upselling present ones.
Burnt’s first agent, Ozai, automates and manages this order-entry course of. Actually, Jacob claims it may deal with as much as 80% of workflows which can be at the moment caught in legacy programs.
Since launching in January, the startup has processed greater than $10 million in month-to-month orders throughout seafood, specialty items, and packaged meals distributors. One of many U.Ok.’s largest meals conglomerates, with billions in income, is at the moment implementing Burnt’s system. The corporate is already producing six-figure income and rising “steadily” month-on-month, although Jacob declined to share precise numbers.
Whereas constructing AI for meals provide chains might sound unglamorous, Jacob says that’s the purpose. He argues that a long time of failed tech rollouts have left operators skeptical of “tech vacationers” with no trade expertise.
His background, in addition to that of his co-founders, has helped Burnt achieve belief in a sector the place relationships matter. Chief Product Officer Rhea Karimpanal — Jacob’s childhood buddy and now spouse — comes from a household that ran eating places, whereas CTO Chandru Shanmugasundaram constructed software program programs for restaurant purposes.
Jacob beforehand labored at Rekki, a Benchmark-backed B2B market for eating places and suppliers, the place he noticed firsthand how brittle provide chain tech may very well be and the way AI may remodel it.
Nonetheless, successful buyers wasn’t simple. AI brokers could also be scorching, however convincing VCs to again one for meals distributors required a special pitch. Many lacked conviction out there regardless of its dimension, he stated.
That’s the place Curry’s Penny Jar Capital got here in. The agency’s thesis is centered on backing founders who’re constructing in “missed” industries the place tech adoption lags.
“20 years of missed software program adoption is an enormous alternative. Buyers who perceive this know it may be big if executed proper,” Jacob stated.
