A liquor store owner can now run checkout, delivery apps and distributor invoices from a single AI-driven system. A wine drinker can scan a label and see how other drinkers rated it. The cocktail bar, where a bartender builds the drink in front of you, has seen far less of that treatment, and a Dutch vodka brand is trying to change that.
Venture Money Is Moving Behind the Liquor Store Counter
On October 6, 2026, New York start-up Santé announced a $15 million Series A led by FINTOP. CEO Darren Fike took a part-time job at a TriBeCa wine store to learn the trade, and he told AlleyWatch he noticed that his favorite New York wine shops ran on legacy systems that held them back. The company sells wine and liquor retailers an operating system that covers receiving and ordering, e-commerce, delivery app management and marketing, with AI agents that read distributor invoices and price slow-moving inventory. Santé says nearly 1,000 independent retail locations use the platform, together processing more than $2 billion in annual gross merchandise volume, and that its business grew 500% in the past year. Those figures come from the company.
Denver-based Scotch attacks the same market from the hardware side. Crunchbase News reported in June 2026 that Scotch raised a $20 million Series A led by VMG Partners. Its product combines point-of-sale hardware, payment processing and a back-office suite that handles state-by-state regulatory compliance. Scotch reports more than $1 billion in processed payment volume and growth above 500% year over year. The company was incorporated in January 2024 and employs about 45 people. Its CTO, Dan Chen, previously served as chief architect at Drizly.
Retailers buy from distributors, and that step has its own software. In 2022, Provi and SevenFifty began combining their data into a single B2B marketplace for beverage alcohol, listing more than 1,200 distributor portfolios and over 700,000 products with pricing, Bar & Restaurant reported.
Drizly supplies the backstory for Scotch’s CTO. Uber paid $1.1 billion for the alcohol delivery app in 2021, then announced in January 2024 that it would close the business in March, saying it wanted to focus on Uber Eats. Two funding rounds do not make a market, but together they suggest investors now favor the software that stores run on over the apps that sit between a buyer and a bottle.
Discovery Apps Turned Drinkers Into Data
Vivino and Untappd took the consumer side first. Vivino, which dates to 2010, reports more than 70 million users and a database of more than 19 million wines. Untappd, owned by software developer Next Glass, widened its scope in November 2025 from beer to spirits, wine, canned cocktails, THC-infused drinks, coffee and soft drinks, according to The Drinks Business. The app has logged more than 1.5 billion beer check-ins since 2010, at more than a million bars, restaurants, breweries and retail outlets, and its drink categories have grown from 450 to more than 900.
Both apps center on the product in the glass. A rating tells a brand or a retailer what people liked. It says much less about whether the person who poured the drink knew what they were doing, and venue-level scoring fills that space.
A Vodka Brand Builds a Scorecard for Bars
Vodka Polar Bear comes at the data question from the venue side. The brand, based in Hilversum in the Netherlands, sells a grain vodka that its production notes describe as distilled five times, filtered slowly near freezing and bottled at 37.5% ABV in Schiedam, the traditional Dutch distilling city. It ships in 70 cl and 1 liter bottles, in cases of six, to liquor stores and the hospitality trade, and it dates its history to 1985. On VodkaPolarBear.com, the company also runs Vodka Lab, a searchable knowledge hub, next to a library of 22 cocktail recipes.
The Cocktail Index page states its purpose in plain terms. Translated from Dutch, it says you do not drink a cocktail every day, so when you treat yourself, you should do it properly. In late September 2026, the brand published the method behind the index and its companion Mocktail Index. Each venue receives a score from 0 to 100, built from four parts: offering (30 points), craftsmanship (25), guest experiences (35) and consistency (10). A score requires a confirmed menu or other proof of the offering, plus independent, drink-focused guest experiences. The index also labels how strong the available evidence is: strong, sufficient or limited. When information runs thin, the score stays blank. The index treats a blank as unknown rather than zero.
The first published scores show the method at work. Super Lyan, the bar at the Kimpton De Witt hotel in Amsterdam, earned 92 out of 100: 29 of 30 for offering, 24 of 25 for craftsmanship, 31 of 35 for experiences and 8 of 10 for consistency. Rosalia’s Menagerie Cocktailbar, also in Amsterdam, scored 82. Super Lyan’s profile also shows the blank-score rule in practice. A visitor praised its mocktails, but the index says it does not yet have enough separate experiences to score them.
The index is built for venues in the Netherlands and other European countries. Volume one lists 21 Dutch addresses, most of them inside hotels, and two carry scores so far. The other 19 show the label “score volgt,” or score to follow. The venue profiles and the full method are public at VodkaPolarBear.com.
Why a Published Method Matters
The weights carry a view of what makes a good night out. Guest experiences hold the largest share at 35 points, ahead of the offering at 30, so a strong menu cannot carry a score alone. Evidence labels add a second signal: the index rates the evidence behind Super Lyan’s cocktail score as strong and the evidence behind Rosalia’s as sufficient.
The implication is that the label may matter as much as the number. A score with a stated confidence level tells readers how far to trust it, which a bare figure cannot do. Operators can read the four components as a checklist of their own: offering, craftsmanship, guest experiences and consistency.
The Mocktail Index also sits in a category with real money behind it. Crunchbase News reported in June 2025 that Athletic Brewing had raised close to $250 million in equity, and that global sales of non-alcoholic beer rose 9% by volume in 2024, per IWSR.
Credibility remains the open question for any new index. Volume one holds two scores, and the methodology article does not yet say how often scores refresh or how venues are chosen. Those details will matter as the list grows, because readers trust a published method most when they can watch it applied consistently across many venues.
The Next Test for Drinks Tech
Wine and beer already have apps that tell drinkers what to expect from a bottle or a pint. The Cocktail Index applies the same logic to the bar and shows its working while it does. If Vodka Polar Bear keeps adding scored venues, the question for the rest of drinks tech becomes who else will publish a method this openly.
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