Santé just raised $7.6M in seed capital, and if you have ever stepped behind the counter of a neighborhood liquor store, you already know why that matters.
Liquor retail looks simple from the sidewalk. Bottles on shelves. A bell on the door. But behind that counter it is organized chaos. Break pack pricing. Vintages. Case splits. State by state regulation that reads like a Shakespearean tragedy. Darren Fike saw it up close, worked the floor, interviewed more than 100 owners, and decided the industry deserved better than pen, paper, and point of sale systems old enough to rent a car. So Darren Fike and Antoine Balaresque built Santé in 2023, a vertical SaaS and fintech platform designed specifically for wine and liquor retailers.
Now Bonfire Ventures steps in to lead the $7.6M round, with Operator Collective, Y Combinator, and Veridical Ventures in the mix. Tyler Churchill, Partner at Bonfire Ventures, is betting that when you modernize the cash register, you modernize the entire store. And that bet is not theory. Santé is already processing roughly $500M in annual card volume and reporting 400% year over year growth. Hundreds of stores are live. That is not a feature. That is momentum.
Santé is not just ringing up bottles. It is scanning distributor invoices with AI, syncing inventory in real time, pushing product feeds to Vivino and Wine Searcher, and managing DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Instacart orders without the stack of blinking tablets behind the counter. The name Santé means cheers, but this is less toast and more torque. The system handles break packs, deposits, kegs, mix and match promotions, and the compliance headaches that come with selling alcohol in America. It even turns customer data into segmented email and SMS campaigns, the kind that quietly add lift month after month.
Joe Canal’s walked away from a 26-year legacy POS. Wine Cellar of Queens cut hours off ordering. Pink Dot and others are leaning into ecommerce and AI driven marketing. When operators with decades of muscle memory decide to switch, that is not curiosity. That is conviction.
The play here is clear. Vertical software wins when it respects the grind. Santé is building infrastructure for a $250B liquor retail market, with eyes on adjacent categories like convenience and grocery. Sales team expansion. Deeper product development. More AI. More fintech. Less friction.
Congratulations to Darren Fike and co-founder Antoine Balaresque for laying the foundation, and to the teams at Bonfire Ventures, Operator Collective, Y Combinator, Veridical Ventures, TipTop VC, Era, UpHonest Capital, Meridian Ventures, and Team Ignite Ventures for fueling the next chapter.
When you build for the counter instead of the conference room, the market notices. And the shelves start to look a little different.
