PartnerSlate, an B2B online marketplace connecting food and beverage companies with co-manufacturers, has raised $4 million to continue scaling its platform.
The Seed Round was led by Supply Change Capital with additional investment from Cleveland Ave, ResilienceVC, Pacific Fin Capital, Mentors fund, Newlin VC and the MBA fund. The capital infusion will allow the San Francisco-based tech company to expand access to its database of over 6,000 co-manufacturers while growing its new marketplace, PartnerMatch, that connects CPG businesses directly with co-packers that meet its specifications.
The new funding will be used to integrate generative AI in the matching process in order to “really get down to the right manufacturer for a project,” said PartnerSlate’s co-founder and CEO Vince Tseng. “We can help identify manufacturers even if they don’t have explicit capabilities to do a project but they’re willing to invest in new equipment.”
The company will also be expanding and automating its platform to help brands and co-mans communicate more effectively and provide task management services on both ends of the production equation.
“Our goal is to become the single source for contract manufacturers to manage and onboard their new leads and their new projects,” Tseng said.
On the platform, co-mans can search the database for free to find leads and new opportunities with food and beverage brands seeking new production. For CPG companies, new project opportunities are posted anonymously to the site and are matched with co-mans that meet the specifications. Brands are charged $199 per listing and co-mans can browse for free; if a project is successfully contracted, they are charged a fee of 2% of the first year of production. PartnerSlate claims to have over a 100 brands posting projects per month and has already connected over $1 billion worth of food and beverage projects to co-mans in 2023.
The idea for the platform came to co-founder Matt Suggs in 2015 during a dinner with friends. Suggs heard about the struggles of finding a good co-man for his friends’ new juice company and decided he would develop a solution. Tseng, formerly the CSO of product protection platform SquareTrade, joined Suggs initially as an advisor and investor then formally became CEO in 2020 as the company readied to launch its database in 2021.
The platform serves as an efficiency resource for co-mans, saving time and energy by matching projects that meet production capabilities.
“For a co-manufacturer, their hit rate is usually less than 10%, sometimes less than 5% of the leads that they get inbound,” Tseng said. “There is no way to get precisely to the manufacturers that have the right combination of capabilities, because you’re not just matching on the processing, you have to have the same packaging, you have to have the same pasteurization capabilities and you have to meet the capacity requirements.”
PartnerSlate works with both large-scale, established food and beverage makers as well as emerging brands to make matches. Tseng said the opportunity for the platform is huge because first time founders and small-scale CPG companies need resources in the process of working with a co-man, but also because the larger brands are often scaling new products so quickly they need two or three co-mans to meet capacity requirements.
“We have some projects that are worth not only tens of millions of dollars of food production, but some that are even in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” Tseng said.