Starday Foods - Series A, $11M

You want to talk disruption? Let’s talk dinner.

While most food brands are out here chasing trends with the urgency of a Monday morning coffee run, Starday Foods is doing something the industry isn’t ready for, predicting what consumers will crave months from now and engineering products to meet them there. Not guessing. Not hoping. Predicting. With AI so sharp it could julienne carrots.

Chaz Flexman, Lena Kwak, and Lily Burtis didn’t build a food brand. They built a machine. A remote first, Scottsdale-rooted powerhouse that’s launched 14 products across four breakout brands, All Day, Gooey, Habeya, and Cozumi, and landed them in shelves at Sprouts Farmers Market, Target, Wholefoods Wholesale, Erewhon Market, and yes, even Walmart. Because democratizing quality food is a mission, not a marketing slogan.

And now? Starday just locked in $11M in Series A funding ($8M equity, $3M debt via SVB), led by Slow Ventures and Equal Ventures. That brings their total raise to $20M, with past support from Haystack Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, XFactor Ventures, ABV, and angel heavyweights like Fidji Simo and Max Mullen. When the folks who built Instacart are betting on your food AI, you're not a startup, you’re a blueprint.

This isn't about chasing Whole30 hashtags or tossing coconut sugar into old recipes and calling it innovation. Starday’s proprietary AI platform is scanning receipts, social feeds, and survey data to compress the CPG lifecycle from 18 months to 6. You heard that right, a third of the time. And what comes out? Bestsellers that outperform incumbents in same-store sales, like All Day’s chickpea crunchers at Sprouts and Habeya’s school-safe, allergen-free crackers now rolling out at Kroger nationwide.

Lena is engineering formulations that meet dietary needs without tasting like regret. Lily is bending machine learning to crack open consumer behavior and regional preferences. And Chaz? He’s threading the needle between venture, data, and distribution like a man who’s scaled brands from scratch and knows the taste of both bootstraps and billion-dollar upside.

This round isn’t just fuel. It’s validation. Starday isn’t building brands, they’re building the rails for what modern food innovation looks like when you pair deep tech with deeper taste. With 4–5 new brands slated for 2025, regionalized product variants, and licensing deals in the works with major CPG players, this team is writing the next chapter of food retail in real time.