burnt Alternatives

AI group purchasing for restaurants

Independent restaurants pay ~12% more than chains for the exact same food supplies because they buy alone. Kaso uses AI agents to aggregate purchasing demand from restaurants and negotiate chain-level pricing with suppliers.

Autonomous freight coordination

Cartage is building Wilson — the only AI built to manage freight for manufacturers and distributors. Wilson handles the tedious work of shipping -- creating loads, booking, tracking, and managing shipments end-to-end.

Building robotic mushroom farms

Hedgehog builds robotic mushroom farms. Our robots eliminate labor and our AI optimizes grow conditions to increase yield. We’ll soon grow mushrooms and fungi for <1/3rd the cost of leading growers. Fungi may address our food system’s biggest problems: they transform agricultural waste into protein-rich foods with near...

Multi-agent AI for physical logistics operations

Physical operations still run on fragmented data, manual guard shacks, and paper lists that are difficult to verify. In yards and cross-docks across North America, facilities face surging cargo theft, strict compliance requirements (like CTPAT audits), and expensive labor bottlenecks. Moving from messy gate logs and hi...

Using CRISPR to find treatments for cancer and inflammation

Algen is using CRISPR to uncover disease-driving RNA messages to find treatments for cancer, inflammation and diseases with high unmet needs. We are harnessing the power of CRISPR and machine learning to find first-in-class drugs that modulate RNA messages at single-cell resolution. Algen's founders are bioengineer fro...

Autonomous surgical robots

We're building autonomous robots to make surgery safe, easier and more efficient. Robots currently perform about 1/4 of surgeries but only help with the physical aspects. We use AI to make surgery cognitively easier. This has far greater potential to improve outcomes and reduce costs. Founded by 3x founders from medtec...