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 Penny Jar 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.
