Our Investment in Santé - The Modern POS for Liquor Stores
Santé is the only all-in-one POS built specifically to solve the most pressing problems liquor store owners face every day.
Note: Attack Capital is an investor in Santé through our Demo Day Fund. Our Access Fund invests in the top decile of startups from recent YC batches. To be an LP, book a call here.
Santé is the all-in-one POS for liquor stores. Santé will empower tens of thousands of liquor store owners to run their businesses more efficiently using modern software.
Until last year, Darren Fike, Co-Founder & CEO of Santé, was a top sales rep at a FinTech company.
He also had a passion for wine.
He saw that his favorite liquor store, Frankly Wines, in NYC still relied on pen and paper for running a majority of their business. To learn more about the problem, he started working there on nights and weekends and interviewed over a hundred liquor store owners.
He learned that 91% of liquor stores are independently owned and operated. Stores were often understaffed and relied on antiquated systems to manage day-to-day operations. He also realized that none of the traditional POS solutions were fit to solve the specific problems that liquor stores face and set out to build Santé, a modern all-in-one POS system for liquor stores.
Problems
Here are a few examples of common problems for liquor stores:
Spending hours per week on manual data entry for inventory receiving and creating purchase orders.
Dealing with complex interstate regulations to sell liquor online (a growing trend)
Working with poor integrations for local delivery (Drizly, DoorDash, Instacart, etc.).
Mishandling products at checkout because many beers/wines do not have barcodes.
Losing sales due to poor integration between their POS and marketing tools.
Losing a meaningful portion of their inventory to theft ($5B+ lost across the industry annually).
Solution
Santé helps independent liquor stores run thriving businesses with a POS built from the ground up to serve their specific needs:
Simple Receiving: Saving hours per week with automated inventory receiving and purchase order management
Theft Monitoring: Using RFID tags on every bottle to track when stolen bottles are leaving the store
Compliance Management: Source of truth on state-by-state shipping so that stores can open a new revenue stream and ship to all available states across the country
Robust integrations: Cutting costs by giving store owners all the tools they need to run their business with one subscription to Santé
Santé is Toast for liquor stores. Toast is an iconic vertical SAAS / POS company, and there is a similarly-sized opportunity in the liquor store industry because independent liquor stores average 3X more annual sales than independent restaurants.
Unlocking Additional Revenue
Santé is also opening up additional revenue streams for their customers with embedded finance for liquor stores. Their all-in-one strategy extends beyond store operations/card processing and into financial services so that store owners can truly run their entire business on Santé:
Embedded Lending: Liquor stores need capital, and lenders today do not factor inventory on hand as collateral in their underwriting model, leaving store owners with generic SBA options that do not meet their needs.
Billpay: Liquor store owners are using disparate systems to pay their distributors today, and we are already tracking accounts payable due dates with our Simple Receiving feature. We will give liquor store owners the ability to pay their distributors within Santé with ACH or direct bank-to-bank transfers. States outlaw the use of credit or debit cards to pay liquor distributors
Charge Cards + Spend Mgmt: Liquor stores are already using Santé to track COGS, margins, and accounts payable. We'll expand to a Ramp-like charge card product with spend management capabilities so that managing cash flow is even easier for liquor store owners.
Niche, but a large market
There are 45K total liquor stores in the US (41K independent), grossing $79Bn in annual revenue. The average independent store grosses $1.5M in annual sales, and $1.3Mn via card sales.
Santé is the only all-in-one POS tailor-made for liquor stores.
The market is fragmented, and there are no clear leaders for POS solutions for liquor store owners.
Before, Santé liquor store owners had two options:-
Outdated, Vertical POS Systems Typically on-premise software that is low and runs on clunky hardware - eg. Atlantic Systems, WinePOS.
Modern, Generic POS Systems with strong basic capabilities, lacking in features unique to liquor stores e.g. Lightspeed, Square.
Santé is the only all-in-one POS built specifically to solve the most pressing problems liquor store owners face every day.
Founders
Santé has a great sales and engineering DNA.
Darren, Co-Founder & CEO, spent most of his career as a top sales rep at fintech firms. He is also a very customer-centric person, bringing a similar ethos to the company.
Antoine Balaresque comes from a product and tech background; he graduated from UC Berkley and has founded multiple startups in the past in robotics, e-commerce, and SaaS. He was previously Co-Founder & CEO at Lily Robotics ($34M in pre-sales, $20M raised).
Darren and Antonio are the team to solve this problem because they are a customer-obsessed duo with a passion for wine and spirits and a deep expertise in FinTech and e-commerce.
Attack Capital is incredibly excited to back them.
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