We are thrilled to announce that VMG Technology has led a Series A investment into Scotch, the modern operating system for the $250B liquor industry. Scotch owns the core system of record for the retailer, which starts with the point-of-sale (POS) system and covers everything a modern ERP does for a business… and then some. Inventory management, ordering, receiving, marketing/loyalty and business analytics, all powered by a modern cloud-based POS that the industry was desperately craving. By providing clean and accurate data, Scotch establishes a source of truth that can finally leverage AI to drive efficiencies.
Liquor retailers feel the pain of opaque processes and operational leakage across almost every function of their business. Pricing changes from distributors are rarely caught across their 10k+ SKU catalog, quietly eroding margins. Inventory is incorrectly labeled due to manual processes during receiving, resulting in no canonical dataset to work from and misordering. Even failed payments at checkout are far more common than in any other category of retail.
Scotch has harmonized this entire process with AI by owning and automating the workflows touching every piece of business context. The result, of course, has been a clear ROI that has driven rapid adoption of Scotch. But what uniquely stood out to us was the intangible ROI, best described by the owner-operators of these stores who reclaimed both time with their family and the opportunity to think about growth/opening new locations.
Given the industry complexity of navigating the three-tier system and inconsistent state-by-state regulations, and the business complexity of migrating a fragmented market off 25+ antiquated operating systems, we knew it was going to take the right team to capture the opportunity. The team is led by Jake Bolling, who previously built and scaled Skupos to tens of thousands of c-store customers, Kevin Hodges as CRO who was the leading salesperson and VP of sales at Skupos, and Dan Chen as CTO who previously built Drizly’s technical architecture as CTO.
Liquor retail is one of the last major categories of retail still running on brittle infrastructure. Jake, Kevin, Dan and the whole Scotch team are exactly the type of people who will change that, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with them on this journey.
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