Removing Friction Is Worth Billions – $1B/Month in Under a Year

01 /The Concept

Keychain built an AI platform that helps retailers and other food sellers simplify the production of private-label products.

The experience works like ChatGPT. Type a product description into the input field – say, "gluten-free protein bars with chocolate coating" – and the platform returns recipe options, packaging concepts, and a list of required certifications to bring it to market.

Critically, these suggestions aren't hallucinated. Everything the platform surfaces is grounded in what the contract manufacturers connected to Keychain can actually produce. Each option represents a fully specified production and supply chain: ingredients, recipe, manufacturing process, individual packaging, case packaging for shipping, and delivery method.

The customer-facing dashboard shows all active product projects with their current status. Clicking into any project reveals a checklist of completed and pending tasks for both the buyer and its suppliers – the full path from concept to shelf.

Keychain charges buyers nothing – no subscription fees, no commissions. The platform earns exclusively from suppliers, taking a cut when they win and fulfill orders.

For this to work, Keychain needs complete, real-time visibility into every supplier's capabilities and capacity. The flip side of the platform is KeychainOS – a full production management system that suppliers install when they join. It handles order intake, execution tracking, inventory, and fulfillment. Near-term additions include production planning, financial management, and risk monitoring.

Keychain launched in the US in 2024. In that short window, 20,000 buyers and 30,000 manufacturers have joined the platform, generating $1 billion in orders per month.

The company recently raised £7.5 million to launch in the UK, where 1,000 buyers and 2,000 manufacturers had already signed up before the official launch. And this comes after the previous $40 million raise just this past August.

02 /Why It Matters

Start with the market. The global consumer packaged goods (CPG) market – the products stacked on supermarket shelves – is projected at $2.4 trillion this year and $3.4 trillion by 2034.

The US market alone is roughly $1.5 trillion. Keychain's current $1 billion monthly run rate – $12 billion annualized – represents about 0.8% of that addressable base. There's enormous room to grow.

Keychain's founder previously built Handy and worked at Angi, platforms that applied the on-demand model to home services. He took that experience and applied it to a more lucrative market.

The insight is that CPG buyers still find suppliers the old-fashioned way: trade shows, specialized brokers, phone calls to factories. Meanwhile, a large share of manufacturers run with significant spare capacity they don't know how to fill.

Keychain's job is to be the active layer between supply and demand – not just a marketplace, but a participant that helps buyers turn ideas into real products, fast.

Speed is the key word. When the US recently tightened import tariffs, requests on the platform for domestic manufacturers jumped 84% – not over months, but over weeks. Capturing that kind of moment requires infrastructure that can respond in real time, not traditional sourcing cycles.

As the founder describes it, the platform has stopped being an efficiency tool for an existing supply chain. Keychain has become a driver of an entirely new generation of CPG products – ones created near-instantaneously in response to market signals.

In other words, consumer goods companies can now ship new products with roughly the same speed and precision that software companies ship new features. This isn't an incremental improvement – it's a paradigm shift in how packaged goods get made.

Keychain is no longer a tool. It's becoming infrastructure.

This brings to mind the Shopify story. In its earliest days, the founder struggled to raise money. Every investor told him the e-commerce market – roughly 40,000 stores at the time – was too small. But the market was small partly because building and running an online store was hard. Shopify removed that friction, the market expanded, and today the platform hosts over 1.5 million stores.

The CPG market is already enormous, but Keychain is removing its own friction layer. More sellers can now consider launching private-label products; more manufacturers can fill idle capacity. The total addressable market could expand as a result – making Keychain's long-term opportunity even larger.

03 /Opportunities

Friction doesn't disappear because someone decided to abolish it. It disappears because a technology shift makes it possible to remove.

In Shopify's case, the enabling technology was the web itself – which made it possible to spin up online stores at scale. In Keychain's case, it's AI – which makes it possible to match buyers with manufacturers instantly, specify full production chains automatically, and monitor every step of fulfillment in real time.

The general direction for anyone paying attention: build AI platforms that remove friction from a specific industry or workflow. When friction drops, more players enter the market, and the market itself grows – creating a larger platform opportunity than existed before.

Where else, beyond packaged food, could this same formula work right now?