A fourth-generation entrepreneur who spent years working in a shrimp factory just convinced Penny Jar Capital, where NBA star Stephen Curry serves as special advisor, to bet on his vision to fix the $9 trillion food industry’s biggest problem: mountains of wasted time.
Burnt announced Sept. 25 that it raised $3.8 million in seed funding led by Penny Jar Capital. The San Francisco-based startup plans to use the capital to build AI-powered automation tools for food supply chain operations currently stuck in legacy systems requiring manual data entry.
The funding round includes participation from Scribble Ventures, Formation VC, and angel investors, including Dan Scheinman.
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From Shrimp Factory Floor to Silicon Valley Funding
Joseph Jacob co-founded Burnt after living through the exact problems his company now solves. His career trajectory took him from processing shrimp on factory floors to managing global procurement for one of America’s largest shrimp importers before working at Benchmark-backed business-to-business marketplace Rekki.
“The food supply chain runs on relationships, hustle, and a thousand moving parts—but behind every order is a team buried in emails, messages, voicemails, and spreadsheets, manually trying to keep everything on track,” Jacob said in the statement. “I’ve experienced this first-hand, from working the shrimp factory floor to managing global procurement, and when I couldn’t find a solution, I began building one.”
The issue Jacob identified affects operations across the $300 billion food distribution sector. Processing a single sales order requires approximately 10 minutes of manual work, with hundreds arriving every minute at major distributors, according to the release. Burnt said this means entire workdays disappear into data entry instead of customer service.
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AI Automation Slashes Order Processing Time by 99%
The platform captures orders from emails, voicemails, and spreadsheets, then automatically inputs the information into existing enterprise resource planning systems. According to Burnt, the technology reduces processing time from 10 minutes per order to seconds.
Burnt currently processes over $10 million worth of orders monthly for customers, including food distributors across meat, seafood, and specialty foods categories. La Tua Pasta ranks among Burnt’s early customers, according to Burnt.
“After using other softwares that start-ups built, I saw why Burnt is different—they actually get the weird, wacky nuances of our world,” La Tua Pasta Managing Director Nicholas Hanson said, adding that he became so impressed with the platform that he invested in the seed round. “They were relentless in making my team happy, and that’s why I backed them in their seed round.”
Penny Jar Capital Founding Partner Bryant Barr praised Jacob’s industry knowledge. “[Joseph Jacob] brings unmatched expertise to the food industry. He has lived every layer of it—from the factory floor to managing hundreds of millions in procurement—and that kind of knowledge can’t be picked up quickly by others,” Barr said in the statement.
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Y Combinator Graduates Target Legacy System Gaps
The founding team brings three generations of combined food supply chain experience, according to the company. Burnt co-founder Rhea Karimpanal comes from a third-generation family business in India’s spice trade, while Chief Technology Officer Chandru Shanmugasundaram built an in-house enterprise resource planning system for his father’s printing press before joining engineering roles at India’s top technology unicorns.
The team graduated from Y Combinator’s summer batch.
“What impresses me most about the Burnt team is they are not just outsiders looking to disrupt a historic industry with radical technology,” Scheinman said. “Instead, they’ve lived this life and know all the nuances in workflows and where the real opportunity is to help.”
Burnt plans to expand beyond order processing with additional AI agents for procurement, distribution, accounting, finance, and compliance teams. The company describes its approach as building “supply chain superintelligence” to work alongside existing systems rather than replacing them entirely.
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