Anchr brings AI to America’s food supply distribution chain with $5.8M raise – News

Anchr Inc., an AI-native company focused on food distribution systems, today announced a $5.8 million seed round led by a16z Speedrun, Anterra Capital, Offline Ventures, Long Journey Ventures and OpenAI .

Every time a person orders at a restaurant, reaches for a tomato on a grocery shelf, or a caterer carries a plate of cutlets into a room, there is an entire living supply chain that puts the food on that table, shelf or platter. Every link in this chain still runs on a brittle network of texts, spreadsheets and systems designed decades ago.

It’s a system that controls billions of dollars of perishable inventory every year — and it’s propped up by one of the most powerful intelligent systems that exists on Earth: human brains. Manual work makes sure that when something needs to happen, it happens; when something goes wrong, humans make sure that it gets back on track.

Anchr believes this is where AI automation can make a difference.

“We built Anchr to become the intelligent layer that works alongside teams every single day, automating away the tedious, unsexy parts of the job to create truly material value for a margin-strapped business,” said co-founder and co-Chief Executive Tzar Taraporvala (pictured, left).

Most distributors depend on enterprise resource planning systems built to follow what has already happened. Transactional databases that attend to the past, not predict what should happen next. They cannot inform purchasing decisions, optimize inventory in real time or manage purchasing risk.

These are the kind of things that AI and machine learning algorithms at which excel.

Company co-founders Tzar Taraporvala and Smayan Mehr (pictured, right) began exploring these efficiencies for more than two decades after seeing how disconnected legacy infrastructure was from the problems it faced. In their paired history, the turning point happened when they partnered with a Boston-based seafood distributor, spending months mapping out workflows on a factory floor, discovering orders being manually input into keyboards at 3 a.m. Spreadsheets became systems of record and finance teams relied on invoices from disconnected systems.

One early customer reclaimed around 40% of daily working time across a team of eight sales representatives through automation. Another customer is on track to increase average order size by about $65 per order across 4,000 annual orders by following demand signals via upsell opportunities.

“If the first era of enterprise software digitized record-keeping, we believe the next era will automate it,” said co-founder and Co-CEO Smayan Mehra. “We call that shift Enterprise Resource Automation — and Anchr is building this inevitable operating layer.”

Looking to the future, Anchr said it plans to deepen automation for every layer of distributors, becoming the coordination system for all decisions moving product or capital. The company believes it could become the foundation of an AI-native solution that drives real work — and beyond food, it could provide transparency and opportunity anywhere physical goods move through fragmented supply chains.

Images: Alison-Schiebel/Anchr, Anchr