Butter, the all-in-one food wholesale operating system, announced it raised a $9M Series A, led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Uncommon Capital, Notation Capital, and angel investor Jack Altman also participated in the round.
At over $1 trillion dollars in market size, the U.S. food supply chain is one of the largest industries in the world. However, the industry still predominantly runs on non-digital methods like pen and paper. Butter offers a suite of products that streamline the entire food wholesale operation, from order management and inventory monitoring to online payments.
“I’ve witnessed the shortfalls of the food industry firsthand. Growing up, my dad would call his customers every night to collect overdue balances and ensure we had goods to sell the next day,” said Winston Chi, CEO and co-founder of Butter. “We created Butter to help smaller food wholesalers get access to technology and insights to scale their business effortlessly. With supply chain constraints, labor shortages, and tight cash flow, these businesses need more help than ever.”
Butter acts as a system of record for all of its customers, managing everything from sales and inventory to payments and e-commerce storefronts. With this unique level of insight, Butter can leverage its data to inform distributors when to restock, down to the exact product, quantity, and date. Additionally, Butter can help its customers easily comply with the FDA’s new food traceability rule.
“Butter has a huge opportunity to revolutionize the entire food supply chain,” said Wen-Wen Lam, Partner at Gradient Ventures. “We’re impressed with Winston and Shangyan’s attention to detail in building their product. They are deeply in tune with their customer’s pain points and dedicated to solving less obvious problems for distributors, which is why they’ve had great adoption by suppliers including major wholesalers. We’re excited to support their team as they build and scale.”
Butter now powers more than $300M in cash flow and sales operations for 6,000 restaurants across the pan-California region. To date, many of Butter’s customers have been able to grow their annual revenue growth by 400%, reduce human errors, and boost cash flow. With the new funding, Butter plans to grow its research, development, and operations team to better serve more customers in new regions.