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.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Source on GitHub

7.4/100 minimal ▬ flat Agent 0/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5

0 APIs

CompanyRestaurant TechnologyPoint of SaleFood and BeverageOrderingTabletY CombinatorDefunct

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5

Composite quality — 7.4/100 · minimal

Contract Quality 0.0 / 25

Developer Ergonomics 0.0 / 20

Commercial Clarity 0.0 / 20

Operational Transparency 0.7 / 13

Governance 0.0 / 12

Discoverability 6.8 / 10

Agent readiness — 0/100 · human only

Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 15

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

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. 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. Want it done for you? Prioritized profiling — $2,500 →

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
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: '0.20'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-20'
tags:
- 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