Forage deployed specialized payment infrastructure across 100,000 US stores to eliminate the compliance rules, balance check friction, and disjointed checkout flows that make processing SNAP and WIC benefits complicated for grocers. Traditional retail software was not built to handle Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) data for digital commerce, blocking merchants from smoothly capturing spend from the 40 million Americans relying on nutritional assistance. Forage solves this backend complexity by connecting legacy government benefit systems directly to modern merchant checkout lanes and online delivery networks.
By unifying these fragmented data networks across all 50 states, the startup provides grocers an immediate avenue to tap into the $1.5 trillion domestic grocery industry. Merchants utilizing the payment rails see a 15% lift in top-line EBT revenue and an 11% increase in shopper basket sizes. The software has handled tens of millions of grocery orders to date, securing commercial integration partnerships with national retail brands like Dollar General, Gopuff, and Save A Lot, alongside digital marketplaces DoorDash and Uber Eats.
The company is also bypassing outdated state benefit portals entirely via a consumer mobile application launched in late 2025. The app lets users check real-time EBT balances, find local merchants, and verify state-by-state product eligibility rules. According to a public LinkedIn post by co-founder and CEO Ofek Lavian, the company secured a $40 million Series B round led by Mouro Capital to scale this footprint. Highlighting the scale of the infrastructure gap, Mouro Capital General Partner Christopher Gottschalk stated that SNAP is one of the largest and most underserved payment ecosystems in the country, noting that the startup "has built the only modern infrastructure to serve it at scale."
