Scotch Secures $20M Series A to Transform Liquor Retail with AI Technology
figure — scotch, an AI-native operating system designed specifically for liquor store owners, has secured $20 million in a Series A funding round, the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively. Operating as an “all-in-one” software ecosystem, Scotch provides liquor retailers with point-of-sale hardware, custom software, payment processing and a back-office suite to manage state-by-state regulatory complexities.
Customers range from boutique single-register shops to enterprise stores running over a dozen lanes. VMG Partners led Scotch’s Series A raise, which included participation from First Round Capital, Lerer Hippeau and Toba Capital. The injection of capital comes on the heels of a growth spurt, with the Denver-based startup reporting greater than 500% year-over-year growth and surpassing $1 billion in processed payment volume. While the company declined to reveal its valuation, co-founder and CEO Jake Bolling said the funding marks “a significant step-up” from its $10 million seed round, raised in September 2024 and led by First Round Capital. Old-school market Jake Bolling, CEO and founder of Scotch. (Courtesy photo) Formally incorporated in January 2024, Scotch was born out of a unique industry challenge encountered by Bolling and CRO Kevin Hodges during their previous venture, Skupos. A convenience-store software company that supported 15,000 stores across the U.S., Skupos attracted attention from major consumer packaged goods giants such as The Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo and Budweiser owner Anheuser-Busch InBev. “Budweiser, in some way, shape, or form, tried to get us not only to continue to grow our C-store business, but to also expand into the liquor store industry,” Bolling told Crunchbase News in an interview. Market research conducted in 2022 revealed a striking contrast between the two sectors. While the $650 billion convenience store market is highly fragmented, its point-of-sale technology is heavily consolidated around four major players. Conversely, the liquor-store industry proved to be an entirely different beast: highly fragmented, intensely regulated and flooded with more than 200 regional, legacy POS systems. Recognizing that the Skupos business model didn’t align with that level of fragmentation, the founders held off. Following the acquisition of Skupos by PDI Technologies in August 2023, the team revisited the concept. Drawing inspiration from the business model of restaurant tech giant Toast — with whom the founders frequently shared strategy notes in the mid-2010s — they recognized the potential to replicate that success in a highly specialized, nuanced retail market. Dan Chen, former chief architect of Drizly (acquired by Uber for more than $1 billion), serves as Scotch’s CTO.
