Afresh Raises $34M to Help Grocery Retailers Reduce Food Waste and Optimize Inventory with AI

Grocery has always been a game of inches pretending to be a game of scale. Margins shaved thin, decisions made fast, and waste hiding in plain sight like it pays rent. Afresh looked at that chaos and didn’t romanticize it. They treated it like a system that’s been misfiring for years and decided to tune it properly.

Now there’s $34M more backing that claim. Co-led by Just Climate and High Sage Ventures, with the bench staying deep from prior hitters like Spark Capital, Insight Partners, VMG Partners, Bright Pixel Capital, Maersk Growth, and Innovation Endeavors, this isn’t a hopeful bet. It’s reinforcement. The kind you send when something is already working and you want it everywhere.

Credit where it’s due. Matt Schwartz built this with a clear line of sight as CEO, Nathan Fenner continues to refine the product as Chief Product Officer, and Kristina Kemmer is driving the technical backbone as CTO, turning complexity into decisions that actually hold up under pressure. Erica Hanson brings financial and operational discipline as SVP of Finance, People, Strategy, while Adam Litle pushes growth forward as CRO, making sure the market doesn’t just notice, it moves. Volodymyr Kuleshov remains part of the origin story as Co-Founder, the early signal behind what this could become.

Afresh calls itself the AI platform for grocery, which sounds clean until you realize the mess it’s dealing with. Short shelf lives, unpredictable demand, and data that behaves like it had a long night. Their tech steps into that volatility and makes decisions at scale. What to order, what to stock, what to produce. The quiet stuff that decides whether retailers win on margin or donate it to shrink.

And the numbers don’t whisper. 70% year over year growth in 2025. Live in over 12,500 departments across 40 states. More than 200M pounds of food waste avoided. Retailers seeing up to 25% shrink reduction, 3% sales lift, and 7% better inventory turns. That’s not optimization theater. That’s operational muscle.

What’s interesting is how this evolved. Afresh didn’t try to boil the ocean. They started where the pain was sharpest, fresh categories, then expanded into center store, frozen, and broader supply chain decisions. Six enterprise-grade solutions later, they’re not just helping grocers react. They’re helping them think ahead.

That’s the real takeaway. This round isn’t about survival or even validation. It’s about scale. When more than 60% of lifetime order volume happens in the last 12 months, you’re not early anymore. You’re in motion. And grocery, for all its legacy weight, is finally getting a system that doesn’t blink when things get perishable.