We’re about to pull off our most ambitious event yet in SF on Wednesday, June 24.

If you’re coming to Figma Config, join us, Bolt.new, and Notion for our experiential festival turned afterparty: Welcome to the Stratosphere.

Food, drinks, and carnival games on a rooftop festival. Immediately followed by a live performance by Cheat Codes, the award-winning DJ trio behind top songs like No Promises.

Spots are limited. Vibes are immaculate. See you there.

Arek and Ethan 🦄

Anchr is an AI-native operating system built for wholesale food distributors. Its AI agents operate from order management and procurement to financial operations and analytics, giving distributors end-to-end visibility and better decision-making. It integrates with ERPs, CRMs, and communication tools (like Oracle NetSuite, Salesforce, QuickBooks, and HubSpot) these businesses already use and consolidates all data in a single dashboard. Compared to incumbents, Anchr agentically acts on information, delivering full context from one workflow step to the next without human handoffs. 

Check it out: anchr.tech

Anchr sells to mid-market wholesale food distributors, which are operators that tend to be large enough that manual inefficiency is costing money every day, but without the already existing internal technical infrastructure of the largest national chains. Its GTM is enterprise-led, with implementations tailored to each customer's existing stack and operational workflows, and pricing terms adapted to each customer's fit and needs.

If you’d like to explore opportunities with Anchr, feel free to reach out to us by replying directly to this email!

People say the worst they can say is “no.” When pitching their idea, Smayan Mehra and Tzar Taraporvala got something else: "What do I need all this AI bullshit for? I've been in this business for 30 years, I can run it from the back of a napkin." 

Ouch. Let’s rewind.

Mehra studied computer science and engineering at Duke before spending time at Apple as an ML Engineer building vision models. After that, he built AI products at LiveRamp, one of the world's largest data collaboration platforms.

The goal since the beginning of his adult life was to build a durable business on his own. It was the only path he could see for himself after growing up around a family of founders and spending all his summers and winters in Los Altos, California, since he was born.

On the other hand, Tzar Taraporvala was born in Mumbai and spent his teenage years in the UK before going to Columbia University in NY for a math and philosophy double major. Next, he became a consultant at McKinsey, leading AI transformations across legacy industries. 

The duo has been best friends since age five.

When Mehra and Taraporvala partnered with a Boston-based seafood distributor to map workflows in real time, they realized the problem was far more complex than originally anticipated. They saw how sales reps manually added key orders into the ERP and finance teams reconciling invoices across disconnected systems. A lot of this manual work is invisible to everyone outside the operation. However, it is responsible for making sure our favorite dish is on the table every day. 

Thus, the idea for Anchr was born. While participating in a16z speedrun, they set a goal of $500 thousand in booked revenue. A few weeks later, the team secured a hard-won enterprise deal that pushed them past that benchmark, and the story of how they got there is a good one to tell your friends. 

With no formal invitation, they flew to one of the food distribution industry's biggest annual conferences after receiving a vague text from the CEO of a publicly traded distributor saying they may get a few minutes. 

This started on the wrong foot: “What do I need all this AI bullshit for?” but turned into an hour-long conversation, which led to six flights in one week. This resulted in an opportunity to pitch to 10 executives and a conversation that ended with the C-suite debating amongst themselves where to deploy the product first. 

And building is what they have done; things have been moving fast since.

The U.S. foodservice distribution industry generates $382 billion in annual sales across more than 17 thousand locations and operates on a median net profit margin of 2.9%. At those margins, inefficiency can become an existential threat in the blink of an eye. 

Yet, most distributors still run their daily operations on a patchwork of legacy ERP systems that only a couple of employees know how to use properly. Imagine email threads so long that they would make an AI summary tool ask for help and spreadsheets that have seen every Excel update since Windows 95. As you can imagine, such a system is rife with opportunities for inefficiency. 

Anchr's solution targets that messy middle, automating the manual work that keeps this billion-dollar operation running but drains time and margin at every step. The platform connects to daily tools distributors already rely on and pulls real-time data across the business into a single dashboard. On top of that, AI agents can act on all that information, so no one needs to manually pass data from one department to another. 

For example, if stock of a key item, say, a top-selling cut of fish, starts running low, Anchr can flag it the moment the trend appears across inventory. Then, it can automatically draft the purchase order or supplier email needed to restock it, ready for a quick human review and send.

The same AI can also identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, keep an eye on overdue balances, and even handle customer support. There's also a chatbot where you can ask questions such as "what's our margin trend on seafood this quarter?" and it pulls from all your connected data to give you an answer.

In an industry dealing with perishable products, where delays and errors compound quickly, this kind of speed and precision means fewer stockouts on top-selling items, tighter control over inventory costs, and, in the end, wider profit margins in a business where every dollar counts. 

The founding team is well-matched to the challenge. Mehra's direct experience leading AI transformations inside organizations is a very good fit for the challenge that comes with selling operational software to businesses that have run the same way for decades. Taraporvalar's background in building AI products at scale rounds out a duo that is both technically expert and immersed in the industry.

If Anchr can demonstrate a replicable playbook in food distribution, the same model has a lot of potential. As Smayan put it: