The executive who brought reservations service Tock to American Express has a new gig. In August, former Tock CEO Matt Tucker joined Provi, a 10-year-old digital platform for the beverage industry, as its CEO. Tucker succeeds founder Taylor Katzman, who will remain on the company’s board of directors as executive chairman.
The move comes just a few months after Tucker’s departure from American Express. Tock, the reservations platform that served some of the world’s most iconic restaurants, will soon be absorbed into sister service Resy. Tucker will step away from consumer-facing restaurant tech (and its associated drama) to take on what might be an even messier challenge.
“I’m lucky to stay in the hospitality industry, but wholesale alcohol ordering is completely different. I think there’s a real product-market fit and right to win,” he told me. Plus, he said, “We’re talking about a $170 billion industry. So there’s lots to be done.”
Provi is a b2b marketplace where bars, restaurants, and retailers can order wholesale alcohol from their distributors in one place. The company doesn’t sell alcohol, it instead routes orders to licensed distributors in order to comply with the highly regulated American market. Restaurants and retailers can use it to research products; brands can advertise to a captive audience. Provi’s national network includes 1,400 distributor partners, close to 50,000 active retailers, and over 1.4 million products. The company is backed by investors including including Bessemer Venture Partners, D1 Capital, and Tiger Global.
While Tucker’s tenure at Tock (and his previous role as an executive at online ordering giant Olo) fell squarely into my purview, I’m less acquainted with the particulars of the beverage business, an exceptional and fragmented industry thanks to a tangled web of regulations. At its core: a three-tier system that’s been in place for nearly 100 years since the repeal of prohibition in the 1930s: Producers, suppliers, and importers on the bottom, licensed distributors and wholesalers in the middle, and retailers — wine stores, bars, restaurants, grocers — on top.
I asked my friend, journalist Dave Infante of Fingers — a newsletter I read and lovingly describe to others as the Expedite of the booze business (you should subscribe!) to help me understand this structure. It’s a bigger question than I realized.
“Just know,” Infante said, “that this is like asking you, ‘Can you quickly explain to me whether DoorDash’s model is good or bad for restaurants?’”
Oof. But he did offer an abbreviated and comprehensible explanation of the deeply entrenched system that sets up the scale of Tucker’s latest challenge:
“The ‘three-tier system’ is actually 50 different systems administered by the states to regulate how alcoholic beverages are sold. The most common format has — you guessed it — three ‘tiers’ of nominally independent businesses working with one another: supplier, distributor, and retailer. The idea emerged after Repeal as a way to prevent vertical consolidation of the industry by big suppliers; an unintentional consequence is that it wound up concentrating a lot of power in the middle tier, where distributors work as statutorily mandated go-betweens (or, less charitably, bridge trolls) deciding what actually makes it to market.”
At 10 years old, Provi is already a formidable player in this very particular business. In 2022, it merged with SevenFifty, a New York-based beverage tech company with complementary strengths including tools for sales rep, important partnerships, and a detailed product database (plus a robust editorial site, SevenFiftyDaily, which I’ve quoted in this newsletter). Combined with Provi’s retailer relationships and an online marketplace, it became a leader in a category of one.
Less than two months after the deal closed, Provi sued Southern Glazer’s and RNDC, then the country’s largest distributors, alleging the two had colluded to block orders placed through Provi in favor of their in-house platforms. RNDC settled in July 2025 and agreed to take orders through Provi, the Southern Glazer’s case was settled similarly a year ago. (Both companies denied wrongdoing.) Soon after resolving these lawsuits, Provi reported more $5 billion worth of transactions had flowed through its platform since launch.
(Since then, the business has gotten messier; RNDC essentially collapsed earlier this year, a story that, again, my pal Dave at Fingers has covered with authority.)
Tucker says he understands Provi’s role in the future of alcohol sales. “We’re not trying to disrupt the business,” he said.
Still, “The scale of the mess is real,” he said in a follow-up email, bolstering his case that the American bev-alc industry is ripe for a tech intervention.
“Eight-plus distributor reps call on a single retailer every week, there are over 1 million SKUs in any given market, and SKUs are up about 400 percent this decade. Bringing a $170 billion industry online is a genuinely hard technology problem.”
Tucker wouldn’t share too much about Provi’s finances — it has “low double-digit millions of dollars in [annual] revenue,” he said — but did detail its business model in our interview, which continues below for paid subscribers.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.