Santé, a fintech platform serving the wine and spirits industry, announced it has raised $7.6 million in funding led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from Operator Collective, Y Combinator, and Veridical Ventures. The company plans to use the capital to expand its sales team and develop new products tailored to grocers and other retailers with complex commercial operations.
Santé focuses on solving the operational challenges faced by wine and liquor retailers, including complex regulatory requirements, tracking specific vintages, navigating state tax laws, managing age verification, and handling keg returns. Retailers must also handle “break-pack” pricing, where a single SKU may be sold as a case, six-pack, or single bottle, requiring synchronized inventory updates. The industry’s fragmented distributor relationships and heavy compliance burdens often result in hours of manual data entry each week.
The company offers a unified, purpose-built platform that integrates inventory management, e-commerce, delivery management, marketing, reporting, and payments, supported by a proprietary AI suite. Santé reported 400% growth over the past year, with hundreds of stores processing $500 million in annual card volume.
Key capabilities of the platform include AI-powered invoice scanning that automatically updates inventory and unit costs; automated customer segmentation and targeted email and SMS marketing; AI-generated e-commerce catalog descriptions and images; delivery integration across DoorDash, Uber Eats, GrubHub, and Instacart directly into the POS; liquor-specific tools such as bottle and keg tracking, vintage management, and mix-and-match case discounts; mobile inventory counting; multi-store inventory transfers with predictive reordering; and real-time marketplace syncing with platforms such as Vivino, Wine-Searcher, and FrootBat.
The funding comes as the company continues to scale its full-stack AI-powered fintech, e-commerce, and POS platform, having processed $500 million in GMV over the past year.
KEY QUOTES
“After over a decade with Atlantic Systems, we switched to Santé, and it’s transformed our operation. Ordering products used to take up so much of my time, but now I can create purchase orders in minutes and focus on my customers.”
Bobby Cahill, Owner of Wine Cellar of Queens
“Wine and liquor retailers have been left behind by traditional POS and eCommerce companies. With the support of the top investors in vertical SaaS, we’re excited to continue building the most effective platform for the wine and spirits industry while also expanding to support small business owners across similar verticals like convenience and local grocery stores.”
Darren Fike, CEO of Santé
“The liquor and grocery industry is massive but also incredibly complex, fragmented and regulated in every state, county and even city. Santé is approaching this industry with the attention to detail necessary to deliver real, end-to-end value with AI. Store owners aren’t simply getting another tool to track inventory. They are getting a companion technology platform that helps them run a stronger, more profitable business with ease. Santé customers are making more money, acting on more insights, and finding new ways to expand their businesses: one customer we spoke to decided to grow his store count by 2x solely because Sante made it possible and profitable.”
Tyler Churchill, Partner at Bonfire Ventures
