# Butter Systems

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/butter-systems/  
**APIs profiled:** 0

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.

## Kin Score — 5.7 / 100 (minimal)

Scored 2026-08-21 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 5.7).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 50.0 |
| Contract Quality | 0.0 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 5.3 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 0.0 |
| Commercial Clarity | 0.0 |
| Access Clarity | 0.0 |

## Agent readiness — 0.0 (human-only)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | no |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | no |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Unknown — onboarding: unknown, pricing: unknown, trial: no (confidence: low).

## Tags

Company, Restaurant Technology, Point-of-Sale, Food and Beverage, Ordering, Tablet, Y Combinator, Defunct

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/butter-systems/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.