{"id":92977,"title":"Burnt - Agentic OS for Food Supply Chain","tagline":"We’re building AI agents that automate order entry for food distributors","body":"# **TL;DR**\n\nLegacy ERPs may run the business for food distributors, but they come at a steep cost - manual order entry alone can consume 10-50 people’s time that should be spent on sales and customer service. Ripping these systems out would take **years**, cost **millions**, and probably spark a small mutiny. Meanwhile, flashy e-commerce storefronts have flopped harder than day-old soufflé.\n\nBurnt deploys AI Agents directly inside these ERPs, starting with a Sales AI Agent that completely replaces the order management job function.\n\nWe’re working with large distributors across meat, seafood, and specialty ingredients - 97% of their orders now run end-to-end without people \u0026 90% of order-entry staff shifted into sales.\n\nWe’re building supply chain superintelligence so that independent food distributors can compete with the US Foods and Sysco. \n\n\\____________________\\_\n\n# **The Problem**\n\nFood distributors that supply restaurants rely on decades-old legacy ERPs - critical to operations but slow, inflexible, and dependent on armies of people to run.\n\nPast attempts to automate these workflows have failed:\n\n* **RPA** works only for structured PDFs, not for the messy reality of food orders coming via emails, calls, texts, WhatsApp, and fax.\n* **E-commerce storefronts** have low adoption, 12-24 month implementation cycles and come at a high cost - both financially and emotionally - for distributors, while still failing to address the nuances of the industry.\n\nThis leaves distributors buried in manual work. Customer service teams are the perfect example of this issue -  they spend most of their time re-typing orders instead of building relationships.\n\n\\____________________\\_\n\n# **Our Solution**\n\nhttps://youtu.be/hRgpT2I1XAk\n\nBurnt’s AI Agents operate inside existing ERPs - no rip-and-replace required.\n\nOur first agent, **Ozai**, monitors all incoming sales channels (email, text, voicemail, WhatsApp, fax – **even phone calls**), learns each customer’s shorthand, habits, and favorite products, interprets prep notes, and enters the order directly into the ERP.\n\nIf something’s unclear, Ozai asks the customer for clarification and continues processing without breaking the workflow. The more it sees, the smarter it gets. \n\nWe’re live with some of the most respected independent distributors in the business, who’ve used our AI to double down on customer relationships instead of data entry - all in just a matter of weeks.\n\n\\_______________\\_\n\n# **Vision**\n\nWe’re not just automating order entry anymore - our customers are turning to Burnt, eager for us to take on tasks like automated credit control \u0026 procurement.\n\nOur mission? We’re building towards a plug-and-play OS that predicts and executes business decisions before humans need to act.\n\n\\_______________\\_\n\n# **Team**\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=92977\u0026key=user_uploads/651960/b94f25ba-340d-4a63-bca3-4c32b129f264)\n\n* **JJ (Joseph Jacob), CEO** -  worked in every part of the food supply chain from farm to table; has bought over 400M lbs of shrimp in his career. Comes from a family with 85 years in the seafood industry.\n* **Rhea, CPO** -  grew up around restaurants, with a design eye that ensures our AI feels invisible yet impactful.\n* **Chandru, CTO** -  built a custom ERP for his dad’s factory as a teenager; obsessed with tech that solves messy, real-world operations.\n\nWe’ve been right there in the thick of it - on factory floors, in seafood markets, and out in the warehouses.","slug":"OBd-burnt-agentic-os-for-food-supply-chain","created_at":"2025-08-14T01:00:27.362Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T06:31:30.637Z","total_vote_count":15,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/OBd-burnt-agentic-os-for-food-supply-chain","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=92977\u0026key=user_uploads/651960/b94f25ba-340d-4a63-bca3-4c32b129f264","company":{"id":30801,"name":"burnt","slug":"burnt","url":"https://getburnt.ai/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/2af9e43cd6c77970b3bff5071024e812ac9ee3e0.png","batch":"Summer 2025","industry":"B2B","tags":["Supply Chain","Food Tech","AI"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/30801"}}