SOFTWARE

INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY

Every restaurant order, grocery shelf and catering delivery depends on a supply chain that still runs on text messages, spreadsheets and systems designed decades ago. Food distributors move hundreds of billions of dollars in perishable inventory each year, yet much of the operational work that keeps product flowing remains manual. Anchr believes this is where AI should be applied next.

The company announced a US $ 5.8 million seed round backed by a16z Speedrun, Anterra Capital, Offline Ventures, Long Journey Ventures and leaders from OpenAI. The funding will support building the first end-to-end AI-native operating system purpose-built for food distribution. than replacing the ERP, it embeds AI teammates across order intake, purchasing, inventory planning, invoicing and collections. Tasks that once required hours of manual work now execute automatically, with context carried from step to step.

“ The biggest opportunity for AI isn’ t in industries with modern infrastructure,” said Tzar Taraporvala, co-founder and co-CEO of Anchr.“ It sits deep in the operational backbone of the economy. Food distributors manage millions in inventory using systems never designed for today’ s complexity.”

The idea emerged after Taraporvala and Smayan Mehra examined supply chain inefficiencies and spent months inside a Boston seafood distributor mapping daily workflows. Orders were keyed into ERPs at 3 a. m. Purchasing relied on scattered spreadsheets, while finance teams reconciled invoices across disconnected systems.

Early customers already show measurable impact. One distributor reclaimed about

40 percent of daily working time across eight sales representatives by automating order intake from texts and emails. Another cut aged inventory write-offs by US $ 30,000 in one month using demandinformed purchasing.

In twelve weeks of Speedrun, Anchr booked seven figures in revenue, serving customers from regional distributors to a US $ 5 billion public company.

“ If the first era of enterprise software digitized records, the next will automate them,” said Mehra.“ We call that shift Enterprise Resource Automation, and Anchr is building that operating layer.”

Looking ahead, Anchr plans deeper automation across sales, purchasing, inventory and finance, becoming the coordination system behind every decision that moves product or capital. Over time this could form an AI-native system of record for distributors and eventually other industries where fragmented supply chains still rely on manual coordination today. •

The gap is structural. Most distributors rely on ERP systems built to record what already happened, not guide what should happen next. They log transactions but rarely inform purchasing, optimize inventory in real time or surface margin risk before it appears.

eCommerce platforms like Choco and Pepper digitize customer ordering but stop there. They do not address purchasing, reconciliation or margin intelligence. The result is a patchwork of tools that document activity without context, adding operational complexity instead of removing it.

Anchr sits above the existing stack and turns it into a system of action. Rather

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INTELLIGENT CIO NORTH AMERICA

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