Why We Invested in Permanent
🚀 We're thrilled to announce our investment in Permanent! 🍃
🚜 Today, the biggest challenge for farmers is selling more. Above all, they need to find buyers for their products.
Most smaller farms lack the resources for transportation or logistics, which limits their ability to work with mid-sized and larger buyers. They need an intermediary to aggregate supply and manage interactions with these buyers. On the other hand, buyers want simple things: access to the best ingredients, at the best price, delivered when and where they need them.
However, the supply chain still poses significant challenges, especially in terms of visibility and the movement of goods.
🛒 Permanent is tackling these problems by building a wholesale managed marketplace that reduces the friction between food suppliers and buyers.
For suppliers, Permanent connects local farmers with buyers they wouldn’t typically reach, boosting their sales. Their technology brings offline supply online, by syncing farmer communications and offline inventory data into a real-time marketplace. This includes creating farmer profiles, managing inventory, and automating payments.
On the buyer's side, Permanent streamlines the purchasing process by improving supply chain visibility, offering access to higher-quality food at better prices, and enabling online ordering through curated catalogs.
💡At BTV, we’re passionate about supporting companies and founders who serve underserved communities.
We’ve invested in several businesses that offer innovative solutions to audiences overlooked by the broader tech industry. We believe that today’s marketplace and vertical software companies have a unique opportunity to deliver new products, solutions, and distribution models, thanks to advances in AI and fintech infrastructure that weren’t available 5-10 years ago.
🔬 We see Permanent fitting perfectly within this vision.
Additionally, we believe that Permanent is well positioned to provide financial services and products in ways that traditional financial institutions can’t, thanks to its proprietary data on supplier availability, crop production plans, and buyer procurement needs. They have already expanded their product suite into financial services, offering Net 1 pay-outs to farmers.
🎉 We’re excited to back Founder and CEO, Wiley Webb. Wiley was the Design Lead at Even, the on-demand pay platform that moved $2B a year of employee wages and sold to Walmart.
In 2021, Webb left his career to marry his two interests — agriculture and large financial flows — in pursuit of transforming the food economy for the better.
Wiley embodies the mission of Permanent and truly walks the walk. Before launching the company, he visited over 70 farms of all sizes across the U.S., researching the economic and agronomic dynamics of specialty crops, as well as the sales and distribution challenges farmers face. He also spoke with large enterprise buyers about their supply chain difficulties. After a year of research, Wiley started his own small farm to gain firsthand experience in agriculture before founding Permanent to drive scalable, global change in the wholesale food system.
📈 Since its launch in June 2023, Permanent’s marketplace has cut distribution costs by up to 50% compared to traditional warehouse-based wholesalers. Their just-in-time model optimizes local and national supply for each customer.
By leveraging AI to support communication, pricing, and logistics, Permanent offers one of the fastest-growing food catalogs in the U.S., with over 200 items available for daily distribution in Northern California, and more than 50 items for large-volume contracts. Additionally, Permanent ensures accuracy and reliability by allowing farmers to update marketplace listings via email, text, and WhatsApp, in both English and Spanish — providing both convenience and reliability for buyers and suppliers alike.
