The next time you shop at a grocery store, you might want to thank this AI startup for keeping the shelves stocked with your favorite food products — and keeping them fresh and safe to eat.
That would be Keychain, an AI-powered marketplace for retailers to buy the consumer packaged goods (CPG) on their shelves started by former Angi (formerly Angie’s List) CEO and Handy co-founder and CEO Oisin Hanrahan back in 2023.
An ERP is enterprise software that integrates essential business functions — such as finance, HR, manufacturing, procurement, and supply chain — into one unified platform, giving organizations a real-time, single source of information about what’s happening across the entire organization at any given moment.
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The global ERP market is expansive and growing fast, valued at an estimated $81.15 billion in 2024 and forecast to reach $229.79 billion by 2032.
It makes sense, then, that Keychain would try to take some of this market share, especially since they’re already assisting CPG manufacturers with their current product search and cataloging software.
In contrast to the current ERP market, KeychainOS is being touted as a faster, CPG-specific alternative to systems like Oracle, QAD, and Plex, which often require months of setup and multiple add-ons before becoming fully usable.
The funding round was led by Wellington Management with participation from BoxGroup and other existing investors, bringing Keychain’s total capital raised to $68 million just 18 months after launch.
Building on a successful initial rollout
Keychain’s story began with a narrower entry point into the CPG supply chain.
“We started with a big vision: build the operating system for CPG. Our first product was a search-and-discovery tool so brands and retailers could find manufacturers,” said Hanrahan in a video call interview with VentureBeat recently.
That initial product has grown quickly with more than 20,000 brands and retailers as customers, thousands of manufacturers — and more than a billion dollars of search-and-discovery volume a month.
In fact, Keychain states it’s currently being used by 8 of the top 10 U.S. retailers and 7 of the top 10 CPG brands, including 7-Eleven, Whole Foods, and General Mills.
Expanding into ERP
KeychainOS extends beyond sourcing into the core functions of manufacturing operations.
Hanrahan emphasized that the expansion builds on Keychain’s existing customer base.
Unlike traditional ERP systems, KeychainOS is designed to be implemented in days and integrates seamlessly with Keychain’s sourcing platform.
The system responds to a need Hanrahan says he hears directly from the market.
“Every four to eight weeks we host industry dinners with 80 to 200 people,” he told VentureBeat. “A constant theme is how hard it is to customize non-CPG software to run a plant, and the lack of connectivity between food safety, procurement, planning, and cost accounting.”
KeychainOS was born to solve these difficulties far more quickly, efficiently, and smoothly.
“We’re starting with customers who already use us for search and discovery—people paying us millions in aggregate. It’s a natural expansion,” Hanrahan offered. “Ultimately, it’ll be everywhere—like water. We’ve already had teams rip out existing food-safety software and replace it with Keychain OS.”
Using AI to augment food safety and manufacturing process checking
One of the ways KeychainOS differentiates itself from legacy ERP platforms is how it handles data entry. Traditional systems often require extensive manual input, which can slow operations and introduce errors.
“Tools are fragmented and hard to use,” Hanrahan stated. “Today the expectation is natural-language interfaces and automated data ingestion—not smashing a keyboard to enter data.”
This reflects a design choice to minimize repetitive entry by enabling the system to capture and organize information in the background.
The company is also expanding how workers interact with the software on the factory floor. At present, the primary interface is tapping on a screen through tablets placed in production environments. However, Keychain is building toward multimodal input.
“On the floor, the primary interface is tapping on a screen—today it’s screen, tap, and type—while we add computer vision, connected scales, and voice,” Hanrahan explained. This means over time, facilities may be able to automatically record temperatures, weights, or other production data without manual input.
Another feature of KeychainOS is the use of adaptive checklists powered by AI.
Instead of static, paper