Meet The 28-Year-Old Businessman Driving The Food Industry’s AI-Powered Financial Revolution
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28-Year-Old Businessman Driving The Food Industry.
Meet The 28-Year-Old Businessman Driving The Food Industry, Drew Fallon, the creator of Iris Finance and a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2026, is saving food companies a ton of money by assisting them in making more informed decisions regarding inventory, new products, and other real-time expenses.
In order to concentrate all of the startup’s data, Drew Fallon began creating a unique data warehouse for the company while serving as chief financial officer of a venture-backed beauty brand. The system was unreliable at best when it was released after a year of testing.
Fallon says Forbes,
Fallon says Forbes, “I was one of those idiots that tried to do a big data engineering project and I ended up using a bunch of different tools that already existed and none of them were very good because they didn’t ingest all the data.” “It’s a horrible nightmare that I was attempting to integrate this forecasting tool with this data pipelining tool and this business intelligence tool.”
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Fallon came to the conclusion that although data engineering could be revolutionary for companies with constantly shifting data streams, consumer brands shouldn’t waste time and effort on it: According to Fallon, “in a world with so many moving pieces, you’re trying to spend money on advertisements, you’re trying to buy the right amount of inventory, you’re trying to test new products, and you’re trying to hire people cash visibility becomes very, very difficult because you have so many different things you have to track.”
In the midst of these difficulties
In the midst of these difficulties, Fallon came to the conclusion that he could resolve the enormous issue affecting all of his rivals and the consumer goods sector as a whole. The 28-year-old businessman is spearheading an AI-powered financial planning revolution for food and packaged goods industries as the CEO of Chicago-based Iris Finance. In order to save the company as much money as possible, Iris Finance combines all data sources, from Facebook ads and Walmart, Target, and Shopify sales to investor cap tables and corporate credit cards. It then simplifies financial chores like inventory planning and modeling.
Fallon has raised $8.5 million since starting Iris in 2024, including from Founder Collective, Glasswing Ventures, and Hyde Park Angels. The business was valued at $24 million, or an implied value of about ten times trailing revenue, when his $6.2 million series A closed earlier this year. Iris is expected to generate $3 million in income by the end of this year, its first full year of operation, from more than 100 brands that pay for a subscription each month. Fallon was included on the 2026 30 Under 30 food and drink list thanks to his momentum.
Read More: To challenge Spotify’s Backstage, Port raises 100 million with a valuation of $800 million.
According to Fallon
According to Fallon, “data is the oil of AI.” “To build data pipelines where we can actually process an inordinate amount of information, we’ve adopted this pretty novel approach.”
Together, Fallon and his two cofounders, chief technology officer Marko Iwanik, 35, and chief operating officer Alex Heckmann, 34, hold more than half of the company.
Jim DeCiccio, a former member of 30 Under 30 who cofounded Super Coffee in 2015 and is currently an investor at Anthos Capital, says, “Iris is the CEO dashboard I wish I had five years ago.” “Drew is operating like a well-oiled machine.”
Fallon was raised in Chicago as the son of a nurse and an investment consultant. In 2019, he earned a finance degree from Miami University.
Before starting Iris
Before starting Iris, he worked as the CFO of Mad Rabbit, a beauty firm formed by 30 Under 30 awardees that acquired $20 million from investors and venture funders. There, he encountered firsthand the challenges of managing cash flow. During his four-year tenure, Fallon came to the realization that expensive errors are frequently made when attempting to allocate funds for advertising and merchandise when the available data is, at most, months outdated or partial.
And he felt he could launch a company to address the issue when he saw that cash flow mismanagement is thought to be the cause of 80% of small business failures. However, none believed AI was worth the hoopla when Fallon presented his concept to investors in 2023. He barely managed to raise $2 million for Iris’s pre-seed round over the course of five months.
Read More: To challenge Spotify’s Backstage, Port raises 100 million with a valuation of $800 million.
When Fallon began raising his seed round and had to repel companies looking to invest for large equity holdings in Iris, the situation drastically shifted in just two years. In just three weeks, Fallon closed the $6 million fundraising.
According to Fallon, “many businesses in our position would have raised $30 million because there are all these investors that are really trying to pressure founders to take more, not because it is in the best interest of the company, but because it is in the best interest of the investor.”
AI startups like Iris are currently the darlings of the food tech industry
28-Year-Old Businessman Driving The Food Industry, AI startups like Iris are currently the darlings of the food tech industry, despite the fact that funding for food enterprises has dried up. The introduction of Iris coincided with this fundamental change, as venture-backed brand founders began to prioritize profit margins. “The industry conversation really started to shift away from how can I grow another dollar of revenue to how can I grow another dollar of profit,” says Fallon. Profit is now far more important to people than it was in the past.
According to Chris Fenster, a client of Propeller Industries, a New York-based finance and accounting firm that serves over 1,500 consumer brands, the data is frequently so segregated for many businesses.
Drew is the client in this situation because he was a real CFO at a company. According to Fenster, “it’s not a couple of tech guys with a good idea trying to force feed something into a market that doesn’t need it.” “He’s really smart, and he’s thinking a few steps ahead, and he has this really deep understanding of the customer.”
28-Year-Old Businessman Driving The Food Industry, Additionally, Fallon was concerned that the burden of the Trump Administration’s tariffs on food and other consumer products industries earlier this year would put further strain on his company. However, it proved to be “a pretty big tailwind” Iris’s sales in the first half of 2025 exceeded those of the previous year. Read more
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