With $2.5M in tow, Sourcery is helping professional kitchens better source their food

Food companies, restaurants, caterers, and corporate kitchens have struggled to find and manage their suppliers in a digital way. Most are still using paper, the Yellow Pages, and telephone calls to do that.

Enter Sourcery, a Y Combinator-backed startup coming out of private beta today to help with that problem. The company has also raised a total of $2.5 million in seed funding in trickles since Y Combinator.

The company has built software that helps its customers manage their food suppliers. Through Sourcery, customers can handle all of their ordering, invoices, and payments online without needing to juggle paper catalogues, ordering on the phone, and keeping track of dozens of invoices every week. Sourcery takes a cut from the transactions done through its site and charges fees to buyers and suppliers for using its tools. It also has a directory of suppliers that customers can browse and use to find new suppliers.

“We are operating in a very big market, and it’s a market that very few people are aware of,” Sourcery chief executive Na’ama Moran told VentureBeat in an interview.

“All these transactions between buyers and suppliers are mostly still happening offline,” she said.

Although it’s publicly launching today, Sourcery has been in private beta since graduating from Y Combinator’s accelerator program in March 2013. The company’s first customer was Palantir — its current head of catering met Moran and team when he was feeding the Googlers — and it now boasts Airbnb, Asana, Dropbox, and Munchery.

Munchery has been a particularly interesting customer for Sourcery. While most of Sourcery’s customers mainly use the software to manage their existing suppliers, Munchery used it to find new ones when it expanded to Seattle.

Moran estimates that Sourcery helps about 30 percent of its customers find new suppliers and that the directory side of its business is an area it should and will invest more resources in.

Sourcery’s 10-person team is currently operating out of its SoMA office in San Francisco, and it’s currently working on further building out the vendor side of its solution. The company is also gearing up to start raising a new round of funding in the near future.

Sourcery raised its seed funding from various angel investors, including Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Yammer chief technology officer Adam Pisoni, Techstars co-founder and Box Group Investor David Tisch, Box Group’s Adam Rothenberg, Postini founder Shinya Akamine, Jeff  Epstein, Oracle’s former chief financial officer and board member of The Priceline Group, the California Endowment, and Y Combinator.

Sourcery was founded in 2012 by Moran and Peretz Partensky, and is based in San Francisco. The company was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2013 batch and also participated in Alchemist Accelerator in 2012.