SuperSeed’s Post

It has been hard to keep quiet about this one... Today, though, I can announce that SuperSeed has led a £3.5m Seed round into Cerve. F&B is a tricky space. It is fragmented, its technology stack is outdated (and, impossibly, more fragmented even than the market), and margins are slim. It is a tough place to disrupt, ripe though it may be for disruption. Many aspects of this job are truly wonderful. Almost every moment of my typical day is spent exposed to unfathomably smart individuals, not least in my own team! Occasionally, someone stands out, even in such a crowd. Meeting Dan Mazig🎗️, it took approximately a nanosecond to establish that we were in the presence of true genius. Dan is not just an intelligent, multifaceted founder; he is an obsessive, diligent builder with maniacal attention to detail. All this is to say that having initially been very cynical about the space Cerve wanted to attack and disrupt, exposure to Dan quickly allayed concerns. As we dug deeper, we realised how elegant the solution he had built really was. Producers, distributors, wholesalers, and all the other participants that make up the F&B supply chain need not pick up the phone, submit an order form via Excel, lose 1,000 punnets of strawberries in an email, or integrate with 90s ERPs any more: Cerve serves as a seamless, real-time data exchange. Dan Mazig🎗️is a wonderful and thoughtful founder, and supporting him is a brilliant commercial leader, David Walker. Together, they have understood the complex web of the F&B supply chain well enough to tackle it, head-on, with the maturity of a startup much longer in the tooth than Cerve. It has been a pleasure assembling a consortium of well-informed, value-additive co-investors in this deal. Elin Torstensson from Zenith Ventures, Antony Yousefian from The First Thirty, and Evi Steyer from Ponderosa Ventures: thanks so much for your contributions to the journey already. I'm champing at the bit to keep working with and for Cerve to deliver on its enormous promise. Finally, I want to make sure Jamie Giles is celebrated for the immense shift he put in to get this deal in good shape! Thank you, J, for the hours and passion you invested: you drove this deal incredibly well, and I hope my dotting some Is and crossing some Ts in no way overshadows your impressive work here. Well done, and thank you. Here's to a bright new future for the F&B industry: bring on the paradigm shift! https://lnkd.in/egr4div2