Matt
Schwartz

In April 2026, Afresh closed a $34 million funding round co-led by Just Climate and High Sage Ventures. Not a pivot. Not a rebrand. A doubling down. Matt Schwartz has spent nearly a decade building AI that does one thing extraordinarily well: it tells grocery stores exactly how much fresh food to order so that less of it rots, more of it sells, and produce managers spend their mornings stocking shelves instead of staring at spreadsheets.

The platform is now deployed across 12,500 departments in 40 states. Major chains - Albertsons, Meijer, Wakefern, WinCo Foods, CUB, Bashas, Save Mart - have handed over their fresh food supply chain to Afresh's algorithms. The results are measurable and, for grocery operators, startling: up to 25% less shrink, 3% higher sales, 7% better inventory turnover. Afresh's 70% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025 suggests the industry's appetite for this kind of intelligence is accelerating, not slowing.

Schwartz summarizes the current moment with characteristic precision: "We've spent nearly a decade building AI to solve the complexity of grocery, and we're now seeing that approach scale across the industry." That scaling is now moving beyond fresh departments into full-store ordering, production planning, and supply chain coordination - a logical extension for a company that has always thought of itself as infrastructure rather than a point solution.

What makes Afresh unusual in the AI landscape is the specificity of its obsession. The company is not building a general-purpose supply chain tool. It is building for the single most operationally complex category in retail - fresh food, where every item has a different shelf life, where demand shifts with weather and holidays and local events, where a misprediction means either a customer finds an empty bin or a worker bags up a hundred pounds of strawberries for the compost pile. General-purpose software, as Schwartz has noted, was "designed for processed foods." Afresh was designed for everything else.

Schwartz arrived at Stanford's Graduate School of Business in 2015 with a singular obsession and a stated goal: found a business before he graduated. He had already logged time at Simple Mills running operations, formulated better-for-you food products, consulted with food biotechnology companies, launched a protein snack brand called Statfoods, and interned at The Production Board - the food and agriculture-focused investment firm run by Dave Friedberg. He knew the food industry from multiple angles. He just hadn't found the right problem yet.

At Stanford, he and a fellow MBA student named Nathan Fenner began working through a deceptively simple question: what does the supply chain for fresh food actually look like? To find out, they didn't build models. They walked grocery store floors. They shadowed produce managers. They talked to nearly 100 people involved in the food supply chain over the course of their research.

What they found was almost impossible to believe. Large grocery chains - companies doing hundreds of millions in fresh food sales annually - were managing their ordering on paper and pen. The stores were running on intuition and experience, not data. Technology built for grocery retail had been optimized for canned goods and shelf-stable products, not for items that might have a four-day window between arrival and spoilage. "We were going to Safeway, to Trader Joe's," Schwartz later recalled. "They were all running this process on paper and pen."

The co-founders - Schwartz, Fenner, and Volodymyr (Volo) Kuleshov - graduated in 2017 and founded Afresh the same year. The thesis was straightforward: if you could model the complexity of fresh food - the perishability curves, the demand variability, the cold chain constraints, the seasonal patterns - you could give produce managers better recommendations than any paper-based intuition. And if those recommendations were good enough, the waste would stop. The food would stay fresher longer. The stores would be more profitable. The customers would find fuller shelves.

That thesis has now been validated at scale. But the early version was a store-level replenishment tool. What it is becoming is the operating system for fresh food across the entire supply chain - from the distribution center to the shelf.

Schwartz is a vegetarian. This is not incidental. His personal relationship with food - shaped by a health transformation as a teenager that changed how he ate and how he felt - runs through everything he has built. When he says that "improving the food system is the single best lever arm to improve both human and environmental health," it is a conviction formed through personal experience before it was a company pitch.

The moment that sharpens his focus on waste is not an abstract statistic. It is a specific memory: watching 300 pounds of ground turkey get thrown out due to over-ordering. A single afternoon in a backroom of a grocery store. That image still functions as a sustained motivator, the kind of emotional anchor that keeps a founder moving when the company-building logistics pile up.

He is also, by his own description, deliberate about how he leads. He practices meditation, journaling, and exercise. He works with an executive coach. He is in therapy. He talks about these practices openly, not as lifestyle accessories but as functional infrastructure for the long work of building a company. The most distinctive practice is what he calls "Feedback Fridays" - weekly check-ins with co-founder Nathan Fenner at local cafes, focused entirely on the interpersonal relationship and explicitly not on work. The logic is straightforward: the co-founder relationship is the load-bearing structure of any early-stage company. You maintain it deliberately, the same way you would maintain any critical system.

His leadership philosophy draws from Stephen Covey - specifically the principle that you control your interpretation of and response to circumstances, not the circumstances themselves. This emphasis on proactivity shows up in how Afresh has operated: the company has never pivoted from its original mission. While other startups chased trends, Afresh doubled down on fresh food, year after year, long before the industry was ready to follow. The patience paid off. The inflection is happening now.

The $34 million raised in April 2026 is not Afresh's exit strategy. It is its expansion budget. Schwartz has consistently described the company's ambition as building the full operating system for fresh food - not just a replenishment tool, but the brain that connects every part of the fresh food supply chain, from distribution centers to store shelves.

The expansion into full-store ordering and production planning is a meaningful step: it takes Afresh from a category-specific tool to a platform that can manage the entire store's fresh operations, including deli, bakery, meat, seafood, and produce in an integrated way. This is the vision Schwartz described at Stanford, and it is only now becoming technically and commercially viable to pursue at scale.

For investors in Just Climate - the sustainability-focused arm of Generation Investment Management, co-founded by Al Gore and David Blood - Afresh represents something specific: a case that AI-driven operational efficiency and environmental impact are not separate value propositions but the same one. Every pound of food that does not go to waste is water saved, CO2 not emitted, land not overfarmed. The environmental logic and the business logic point in the same direction.

That alignment is what Schwartz has been arguing since 2017. The fact that major institutional sustainability investors are now leading his funding rounds suggests the argument has been won.