Anchr raises $5.8m to automate food distribution’s manual back office

Anchr has raised a $5.8 million pre-seed round to automate the back office of America’s food distribution industry, a sector still running on phone calls, spreadsheets, and manual order entry.

On any given morning, the operations team at a mid-size food distributor might spend hours logging orders from restaurant clients, received by email, text, voicemail, and occasionally fax, into an ERP system that was probably designed before smartphones existed. They will chase late payments, reorder from suppliers based on intuition as much as data, and field calls from customers wondering where their delivery is. It is a business that feeds millions of people and moves billions of dollars of product. It is also, in large stretches, still running on manual labour.

Anchr, a New York-based startup founded in 2025, is betting that AI agents can fix that. The company has raised $5.8 million in pre-seed funding to ...