Food supply chains are notoriously messy. Orders arrive through different channels, staff spend hours manually entering them into clunky enterprise software systems, and compliance often depends on spreadsheets.
For decades, software vendors have tried, with mixed success, to modernize the workflows behind the global movement of perishable goods.
Now, a Y Combinator startup called Burnt thinks AI agents — software that can automatically handle tasks typically done by humans — can succeed where traditional enterprise software hasn’t in the trillion-dollar U.S. food market.
The company, which automates back-office supply chain tasks with AI, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding led by PennyJar Capital, the venture firm backed by NBA star Steph Curry, with participation from Scribble Ventures, Formation VC, and angel investors, including Dan Scheinman.
Burnt co-founder and CEO Joseph Jacob grew up around food factories. He says his great-grandfather was the first to export shrimp from India to the U.S. in the 1930s. Since then, each generation of his family has worked somewhere along the seafood supply chain, including farming, processing, exporting, and importing.
Jacob moved to India during his formative years and, after college, worked on the factory floor of a shrimp processor in a rural area. The experience introduced him to the intricacies of the food and restaurant business.
When he returned to the U.S. and began managing large volumes of seafood imports, he noticed major inefficiencies.
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“I ended up buying hundreds of millions of pounds of seafood, but everything was tracked on Excel sheets and a 20-year-old ERP system,” Jacob told TechCrunch. “In a business with razor-thin margins, it’s nearly impossible to succeed without good supply chain management. We went through multiple software implementations, but two rollouts failed. That’s when I realized I wanted to build software for this industry, not just work in it.”
Jacob’s experience isn’t an isolated one. Enterprise vendors have long tried to sell distributors on large rollouts that drag on for years, cost millions, and frustrate the small and mid-sized players that dominate the market.
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