GrubMarket, a B2B marketplace for food service distribution, has made 100 acquisitions since the company was founded 10 years ago.

Now, GrubMarket’s latest acquisition of Butter for an undisclosed price will serve GrubMarket’s growing appetite for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The marketplace hopes AI solutions will be able to facilitate faster ecommerce and digital payment processing for small restaurants and neighborhood grocers.

San Francisco-based Butter is a four-year-old company with a software product suite of AI-powered sales tools, cloud-based enterprise resource planning and integrated online payment solutions for food distribution companies.

To date, Butter has raised more than $39 million in funding with a business base that includes more than 11,000 buyers. It also processes hundreds of thousands of orders annually, the company says.

Why GrubMarket acquired Butter

The acquisition will integrate Butter’s AI-powered ecommerce and payments applications with GrubMarket’s existing platform products, which include:

• WholesaleWare, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. It provides food industry wholesalers and distributors with tools for fiscal management, sales support, online ordering, inventory management, lot traceability, grower accounting and automated routing and logistics.
• GrubAssist AI, an analytics and analysis tool for food supply chain businesses.
• GrubMarket’s mobile ecommerce tools.

“The Butter team is incredibly enthusiastic about helping food wholesale distributors better run their businesses by building software and AI that help them grow sales, streamline operations, and deliver excellent products and services, without drowning in manual tasks like repetitive phone calls and messy spreadsheet data entry,” says Butter cofounder Winston Chi. “We were keen to join forces with GrubMarket, who shares our passion for being an AI-powered technology enabler and digital transformer to drive meaningful change for the food supply chain industry.”

GrubMarket weighs in 

GrubMarket connects farmers with consumers for home delivery. It also sells food to grocery retailers and restaurants. Walmart, Costco and Whole Foods are among its customers. GrubMarket operates in all 50 U.S. states along with parts of Canada, South America, Asia, and Africa.

“We have known about Butter for a little while now and are impressed with their ability to leverage advanced AI to build unique software applications that are highly complementary to our WholesaleWare and GrubAssist AI products,” says GrubMarket CEO Mike Xu.

Submit a nomination

Nominate a game-changer for the Global B2B eCommerce Industry Awards from Digital Commerce 360 and the B2B Ecommerce Association.

Sign up

Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week. It covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact Mark Brohan, senior vice president of B2B and Market Research, at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @markbrohan. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.