GETASAP

The promise of AI is to bridge the gap between the unstructured world and the structured one.

We are getting much better at turning raw information into useful decisions. Text becomes data. Data becomes analysis. Analysis becomes code. Code has already shown its potential in making decisions that once required people.

But this pipeline has limitations at both ends.

On one end, AI is only as good as the data it receives. If the data collection is limited, the intelligence built on top of it is likewise.

On the other end, the ability to come up with good decisions and strategies with AI does not correlate with efficient execution. AI can tell you what should happen, but unless it has a way to act in the physical world, the work still falls back onto people to execute. Therefore, not much changes except for the impracticable realization that your operation is inefficient.

This is why many of the industries most important to society have benefited less from software than people assume. They need better infrastructure and operators who understand how to build and maintain that infrastructure.

Fresh produce is one of those industries.

An Industry That Has Barely Changed

Fresh produce distribution has hardly changed in decades.

Many of the largest companies in the industry are still family businesses started by someone's parents or grandparents. Others are holding companies that acquired those same businesses. The names have changed, but the operating model often has not.

In the time America went to the moon, connected most of the world to the internet, and shrank transistors by orders of magnitude, the system responsible for moving much of our food has remained surprisingly manual.

That is strange when you think about it.

Most Americans interact with this industry several times a day, though the mechanics powering it are often unseen. Every strawberry in a grocery store, every avocado in a restaurant, and every case of lettuce has passed through a long chain of farms, packing houses, trucks, brokers, warehouses, inspectors, and buyers.

The phrase "fresh produce distribution" makes this sound simpler than it is, and "fresh" itself is often a mischaracterization.

It is a complex coordination problem across agriculture, trucking, ocean freight, air freight, cold storage, food safety, customs, trade compliance, labor, packaging, energy, water, weather, and inventory management. And the product has to pass through all these hoops and get to your house in just a few days. No, the solution is not another ERP dashboard.

The moment produce is harvested, it starts losing value every subsequent hour. A software bug can be fixed after shipping, but a spoiled case of produce cannot.

The poor state of produce logistics is therefore not the result of one broken industry. It is the accumulated result of many older systems depending on one another across dozens of industries.

A farm may still record inventory manually. A packing house may operate on spreadsheets. A trucking company may rely on phone calls to arrange pickups. A buyer may not know the exact temperature or location of a load. A distributor may not know what inventory will actually arrive until the truck reaches the dock.

Each middleman passes their inefficiency onto the next. By the time the product reaches the consumer, everyone has paid for it.

Why We Entered the Industry

After our YC batch, we decided to enter the fresh produce industry earlier this year with GETASAP.

At first, the industry seems like the exact opposite of what a college-educated CS student would want to spend their time working on.

It's an old, fragmented, capital-intensive, operationally complex, and relationship-dependent industry built over decades, where nearly every part of the business required knowledge we did not yet have.

But that was also what made it attractive after a set of realizations. The industry was not resistant to technology because it did not need it. It was resistant because most technology companies were unwilling or too lazy to do the physical work required to make the software useful. The company that solves this problem will have to be competent in both the physical and software worlds to make a real difference.

Distribution and Freight Are One System

GETASAP is focused on transforming fresh produce logistics through two businesses: GETASAP Fresh and GETASAP Logistics.

GETASAP Fresh handles the produce distribution itself, and GETASAP Logistics handles its movement.

Most companies choose one side, either selling produce or freight, but we believe this is exactly where the problem originates. The separation of these highly interdependent industries is one of the main sources of inefficiency in the supply chain.

A produce distributor that does not control logistics cannot fully control quality, timing, or visibility. A logistics company that does not understand produce cannot make the right decisions about temperature, shelf life, or sourcing.

Therefore, our model is sourcing, packing, distribution, freight, tracking, documentation, and customer service all working as a single unified system, powered by AI and better decision-making.

Why the Industry Has Historically Low Margins

Fresh produce is known as a low-margin business.

The product is perishable, demand changes quickly, and supply depends on weather, seasonality, and crop quality. Freight prices are volatile enough to have indexes tracking them, buyers are price-sensitive, and inventory can lose its value before it is sold.

But low margins are simply a consequence of how the industry operates, where every extra middleman takes a margin and every delay creates waste. Every manual point of entry is another chance for error.

Why Now

Industries as complex as produce distribution do not transform simply because new technology exists, but because of several changes happening at once and their compounding effects.

We are living at a time when physical AI will likely become capable of delivering double-digit efficiency gains in produce within just a few years. The use cases are plentiful, with obvious applications ranging from AI-powered laser systems that kill weeds on farms to computer vision-powered spoilage detection systems in packing facilities.

The problem is not that the technology doesn't exist. It does, and it will only improve from here. The problem is that the right players to take advantage of it do not yet exist: businesses whose operating models are perfectly designed to benefit from these advances.

A company that is vertically integrated, technologically ambitious, and driven enough to implement frontier technologies while remaining relentlessly customer-obsessed is what we intend to build with GETASAP.