Butter Systems

Butter Systems was a San Francisco restaurant-technology startup founded in 2013 by Sam Brin and Jon Li and backed by Y Combinator (batch S13). The company replaced the paper restaurant menu with a locked-down tablet at the table, letting diners browse an interactive menu, place food and drink orders on demand without waiting for a server, and request the check, while restaurant operators adjusted menu items, pricing, and promotions on the fly through a web back office. Butter Systems raised roughly $120K across two seed rounds in 2013 from Y Combinator and Fenox Venture Capital, and shut down in 2014. Y Combinator lists the company as inactive, and its buttersystems.com domain is now a parked "domain may be for sale" page. Butter Systems published no public API, developer portal, SDK, or machine-readable specification, and none survives in the Internet Archive record; it is retained in the API Evangelist network as a closed-company reference only.

Butter Systems is profiled on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Company, Restaurant Technology, Point-of-Sale, Food and Beverage, and Ordering.

📡 Source on GitHub

0.0/100 minimal Agent 0/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-09-25 · rubric v0.23.0

0 APIs

Company Restaurant Technology Point-of-Sale Food and Beverage OrderingTabletY Combinator Defunct

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-09-25 · rubric v0.23.0

Composite quality — 0.0/100 · minimal

Contract Quality 0.0 / 21

Developer Ergonomics 0.0 / 17

Access Clarity 0.0 / 17

Operational Transparency 0.0 / 11

Contract Governance 0.0 / 10

Discoverability 0.0 / 9

Regulatory Posture 0.0 / 15

Agent readiness — 0/100 · human only

Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Horizontal (data, software, accessibility, platform) regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics could not be measured. We hold no machine-readable contract for this provider to read, so there is nothing to measure a write surface against. Excluded rather than scored zero: never-measured and measured-empty are different facts. Publishing an OpenAPI is what makes this facet — and several others — scorable at all.

The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/butter-systems: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Resources

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHubOrganization

GitHubOrganization

Other 3

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

CompanyProfile

CompanyProfile

CompanyProfile

CompanyProfile

Archive

Source (apis.yml)

aid: butter-systems
deliveryModel:
  model: unknown
  open_source: false
  commercial: false
  callable_host: false
  label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
  confidence: low
  source:
  - none
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source: []
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/butter-systems.png
name: Butter Systems
description: Butter Systems was a San Francisco restaurant-technology startup founded in 2013 by Sam Brin and Jon Li and backed
  by Y Combinator (batch S13). The company replaced the paper restaurant menu with a locked-down tablet at the table, letting
  diners browse an interactive menu, place food and drink orders on demand without waiting for a server, and request the check,
  while restaurant operators adjusted menu items, pricing, and promotions on the fly through a web back office. Butter Systems
  raised roughly $120K across two seed rounds in 2013 from Y Combinator and Fenox Venture Capital, and shut down in 2014.
  Y Combinator lists the company as inactive, and its buttersystems.com domain is now a parked "domain may be for sale" page.
  Butter Systems published no public API, developer portal, SDK, or machine-readable specification, and none survives in the
  Internet Archive record; it is retained in the API Evangelist network as a closed-company reference only.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/butter-systems/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- a16z
x-backed-by-verified: false
x-backed-by-note: Enrichment could not corroborate an a16z investment. Public sources (Crunchbase, Tracxn, FinSMEs, Y Combinator)
  attribute Butter Systems' 2013 seed funding to Y Combinator and Fenox Venture Capital only. The a16z attribution came from
  the VC-portfolio harvest and should be treated as unverified.
x-status: defunct
x-status-detail: Shut down in 2014; Y Combinator lists the company as inactive. buttersystems.com resolves (HTTP 200) but
  serves a parked domain-for-sale page. api./docs./developer.buttersystems.com do not resolve. /.well-known/security.txt and
  /llms.txt both return 404.
x-founded: '2013'
x-closed: '2014'
x-accelerator: Y Combinator S13
x-api-surface: none
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-20'
tags:
- Company
- Restaurant Technology
- Point-of-Sale
- Food and Beverage
- Ordering
- Tablet
- Y Combinator
- Defunct
tags_raw:
- Company
- Restaurant Technology
- Point of Sale
- Food and Beverage
- Ordering
- Tablet
- Y Combinator
- Defunct
apis: []
common:
- type: GitHubOrganization
  name: Butter Systems on GitHub
  url: https://github.com/buttersystems
- type: CompanyProfile
  name: Butter Systems on Y Combinator
  url: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/butter-systems
- type: CompanyProfile
  name: Butter Systems on Crunchbase
  url: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/butter-systems
- type: Archive
  name: buttersystems.com in the Internet Archive
  url: https://web.archive.org/web/*/buttersystems.com
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-20'
  status: minimal
  artifacts_added: 0
  pass: local-v1
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io

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