Stord raises $200M Series E as tariff chaos drives brands to outsource fulfillment to its cloud supply chain platform

you doing? Good to be here. Thank you guys for having me. Kick it off with the funding announcement. What's going on? What's new with you? Yeah, we're excited today to announce that we've raised $200 million across our series E. Congratulations. Series E. Series E. Been waiting for that gong moment. That's amazing.

Let's go. We're going to hit more. We're going to hit more sound effects. Give me the Ashton Hall. Success. Overnight success. Yeah. How long you've been doing this? I'm a few months away from my 10y year anniversary with stories. Wow. Exactly. Overnight success. overnight. Classic overnight success. That's great.

Uh, but introduce the company. Break it down for us. What do you do? For sure. So, we're building a commerce enablement platform that's entirely designed to level the shipping experience for brands of all sizes with Prime.

Over the last two decades, retail has changed where you don't walk in a store and swipe your credit card and walk out with the product. You swipe your credit card online and you walk out with trust. Trust that you're going to get the right product when the brand said you're going to have easy returns.

And these massive giants like Amazon have realized that is what's driving today's buying behavior. And so they've invested tens of billions of dollars into building out this competitive advantage.

Meanwhile, every other brand is kind of in this stone age where if it's take cloud computing, they're still building their own data centers, managing their own racks in their office.

And so we give them a scalable platform that combines an end-to-end physical fulfillment network that ships over 30 million packages a year. Last year we hit about 15% of US households. We powered over 1% of Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

But then all of the technology not only that runs that network, but that also speaks to the consumer. So there's a high probability to either yourselves or people listening actually delivered you a package before powered that tracking link. You may never even have known. Wow.

So talk about how asset heavy or asset light the business is. Uh what do you own? Do you own warehouses, trucks, planes, boats? uh what are you sitting on top of? Who are your key partners to make this happen? Yeah, great question. Our three pillars are really a network, software, and scale.

We give economies of scale across a network of assets. Some of those we run ourselves. So, we do now operate 13 fulfillment centers. Okay. Employ about 2,000 individuals across those fulfillment centers. There we go. Congratulations. That's huge. That's crazy.

keeps me on planes uh all the time, constantly going to a different city. Um but then about 70% of our business is an entirely asset light network, existing warehouses, existing trucks, particularly existing last mile carriers where we manage a network of about three dozen of them.

But then all of that overlaid with our technology so the customer has one consistent experience no matter where we deploy their inventory. Uh we talked to Harley at Shopify. How important are uh small businesses to your business versus going after the scaled e-commerce players?

Obviously, not Amazon, but maybe Walmart or, you know, Macy's and like the really big players. Great question. I'd say we're kind of squarely in the middle where we serve a lot of mid-market brands, about 500 of today's market leaders.

So we power all of the deliveries for brands like Athletic Greens, Seed Health, True Classic TE's, Proactive, the Skincare, Equip the Toothbrushes, Billy the Razors. It's a lot of today's kind of multiund million revenue leading brands, the types of companies you'd see walking the aisles of a Target for example. Yeah.

Is that is that mostly founder? I imagine that a lot of the founders of those companies kind of in your boat, been in business maybe a decade, raised a bunch of money and kind of at the same conferences. Uh is that how you're doing bisdev? Do you have a massive sales force? Are you doing outbound? What's working?

What's not? Yeah, we are one of the flattest founder sales cultures you're you'll find. Uh we actually sell I mean last year we were nine figures of new sales. This year we multi- nine figures of new sales in terms of how we're growing.

We have a seven rep sales team and so uh we we are on the plane all the time meeting with our different brands, meeting with these customers. Um and I think that's actually one thing that blew away investors in this round. If you look at our last four quarters of sales beats, I mean we were 3x our Q1 goal.

This Q1 alone, we take most of the year, uh, we have a fraction of a kind of percent of revenue on sales and marketing and R&D to a lot of peer companies, yet a lot of ROI.

This is such a funny interview because not only is it live, which is obviously a little higher stakes, but there's also a very chaotic soundboard potentially throwing you off. Well, I mean, there's so many every single I I I don't want to throw you off. I just Good news. That's my personal reaction.

But if you can make it through a TBPN interview like Bloomberg or CNBC is going to be a walk in the park, no sound board, really easy. You got a question? What was the what was the dynamic?

I mean, I imagine the last, you know, five, six weeks have been intensely stressful just because of what your underlying customers have been going through. Did the round get kind of done before that or were you simultaneously navigating trade?

I imagine you were navigating a trade war and a new financing just sounds sounds intense but but what did the timeline look like? Yeah, we kind of come to the principle that everything crazy happens at once at stored so it's uh it's never a time time off.

Uh I'd say that we were laying the groundwork for some of this before the trade war really started. Uh, and it kind of threw a big wrench into the fund raise in terms of some people realized how good it was for us and some people got really scared.

Uh, thankfully and it's unfortunate to say, store grew massively at other issues. Take COVID, take war breaking out. Take um, uh, the UPS or Canada Post strikes. All those are a reason for a brand to say, you know what, I'm not going to face this on my own. I don't have the economies of scale to stay flexible.

I don't want all the risk on my business. let me go to a network like stored. And so thankfully very similar here where there's really two tariff issues going on. One is anything that comes into the ports from other countries in large quantities and that's kind of the standard tariff people are talking about.

The other one is the dimminitimus IMAX section 321. all these e-commerce brands sending small packages into the US, not via a container on the water, just a small package where if it's under $800, they haven't paid taxes or tariffs on the import.

That was really made for people like us, individuals traveling internationally, sending products back to families, and it got exploited into this massive program where about half of Shopify's top 100 e-commerce businesses were shipping from outside the US.

And so when that changed, all of a sudden all these brands had to have this influx of volume into the US and these traditional providers, again back to kind of the data center analogy, are telling them, "Oh, we can get you live and set up a new fulfillment center for you in six to eight months.

" We had a case study with that true classic t-shirt brand, multiund million revenue retailer. Took them live from meeting us and signing to fully outbound shipping in 18 days. And that's only possible on a techdriven network. How much of the business is international versus domestic?

About 9% of our revenue would be either packages leaving the US or actually holding inventory uh internationally. Okay. Uh I have another question. Go for it. Uh I I noticed that the the raise was a mix of debt and equity. Uh what are you using debt for?

Uh, and how do you think about is this the first time you've really included debt in a big fund raise? Um, and then I have more questions that we can riff on after that.

Yeah, I think for storage, we're at a late stage where part of what we announced in this round is profitability, which I think is a lot rarer in a category like ours. We've spent multiple quarters in a row now consistently profitable.

And that's compared to venture times when you're in a rapid delivery business and people are wondering are we using venture dollars to subsidize fast deliveries. Well, I think the the proof is in our unit economics and in that profit.

But at the same time, we still had a strong balance sheet from the 300 plus million dollars we had raised prior.

And so when we looked at this round, we kind of said, let's raise the right amount of equity, but let's also use the scale, the profitability to complement the balance sheet with the right cost of capital and the right flexibility. And part of it comes down to we actually have been inquisitive in the past as well.

We've acquired three businesses over the last few years. All existing fulfillment centers because we've just seen if we onboard existing infrastructure to our technology, we can multiply the success of those customers, the profits of the the the acquired business and more.

And so, uh, plan to be on the lookout for more opportunities like that as we keep growing, which I think, funny enough, we started that, our first one in 2020. Very not in vogue for venture-backed businesses to be making acquisitions now with this kind of AI wave and more.

There's actually some specific funds that are just being built to roll up traditional businesses and apply technology to them. What are you seeing that's exciting around actual uh fulfillment automation and robotics?

This has been obviously a tough challenge that again the major players have invested billions of dollars at this point into uh and yet oftent times fulfillment is still a very manual sort of process.

It feels like if you're building a 3PL from the ground up, it's maybe easier to think robotics first if especially if you're a tech company young. You're obviously aware of everything that's happening in AI, but uh at the same time, hard to replace a human. They're pretty versatile.

Yeah, we're very excited about both AI and robotics because labor and humans are one of the biggest costs in a business like stored.

and going all the way back to day one starting even back then we were seeing peer startups in in different cohorts and accelerators and more that were building drones for inventory scanning and all this robotics and uh it oftentimes shock someone when you step back and you say hey you realize over 60% of US warehouses aren't even using a digital WMS they're doing pen and paperbased picking it sounds like it's made up it doesn't sound possible but it's true and so then you kind of look at this gap of where the industry is And if they can't even get to that kind of threshold, one, getting to humanoid robots or AI deployed on how to slot in a warehouse is essentially impossible.

And so there's such a fundamental advantage when we've built an entirely vertically integrated tech stack of we're really the only ones like Amazon when we're making you that promise in the cart. Hey, order now, you'll get it by 5:00 p. m. tomorrow or the next day.

We're actually going through not only the front-end consumer tech, the order management layer, the transportation management layer. We're looking at we actually have this unit in Las Vegas right now. We can get it to California by tomorrow if we ship it right now.

And so we're connecting that vertically integrated system which just gives us so much more opportunity to deploy robotics, AI, and more. And so a lot of it's on the AI wave right now. How do we use it to optimize demand planning, inventory placement, parcel selection, promise to c the consumer and more?

And the next phase is we've been using some robotics particularly around the uh conveyance slotting uh and picking in the facilities. But when you can go from static with a moving arms to both moving arms and moving legs with a humanoid, it gets really interesting. Mhm.

Uh on other big tech trends, uh what are you most optimistic about across uh kind of the EV tall package delivery that we're seeing from zipline to uh something like automated trucking uh self-driving trucks to uh maybe even something just like really really robust language model driven AI agents uh just doing some of that paperwork for example but 100% reliably like what technologies are you the most optimistic about?

And if you have any timelines, I'd be interested to hear them. Timelines is always the question mark because uh even some of the ones you just mentioned, there's been heavily debated and now disproven timelines over the last decade already.

So I I struggle to make promises, but but which one would have the biggest impact on the customer experience? uh which one should we be really rooting for uh in terms of just speeding up the the time to delivery and reducing the cost?

I think any form of autonomous delivery whether the amazing teams over at Zipline and that kind of localized rapid last mile uh some things that failed even at Amazon like the driverless kind of sidewalk robots.

Anything that helps connect that last mile autonomously bends the cost and speed curve so dramatically that that's probably where we remain the most hopeful and excited. But with a model like store being the network, essentially what we're doing is aggregating the demand and putting it on one form of tech.

But a lot of these businesses you're mentioning are actually key partners of ours where somewhere in our network we're able to kind of test this net new technology. So, same thing with one of the major uh grocery and kind of food delivery platforms.

We have a pilot in a few cities for same day delivery for some of our brands, 2hour or less type delivery. Uh but you wouldn't assume if you looked at store that we're working with that type of company because it's buried in the network.

So anything autonomous last mile, anything humanoid in a facility and really anything around demand planning with AI, I think that is the most critical because if you talk to brands, demand planning is the thing that really only enterprises will say they do well and I think most of them are uh a little self-impatuated when they say they're doing it well.

Demand planning is the biggest struggle in anything physical supply chain and speaks to uh the problem our friends at Pelaton had during co it's really hard. Uh I'm looking at the bottom of our ticker. It's uh poly market has the US recession in 2025 dropping like a stone. Let's hear it for the US economy.

But my question for you is uh are you seeing data on the health of the US consumer? How how is uh demand in the US economy? Yeah, we have a really interesting kind of front line to the consumer across a lot of industries. We've purposefully positioned to very macro resilient industries.

Things like health and beauty, you still the same makeup and skincare and bad times, things like nutrition and supplements, very similar. A lot of subscription orders that we fulfill, almost 50% of the volume we ship. And so thankfully our brands have been pretty well insulated.

But we actually saw an interesting trend in April which was uptick for many of them and we were questioning it saying is this consumers buying because they think prices are about to go up or what is this signal? And so so far we haven't seen a kind of bull whip from that negatively in May.

And so year to date our our metrics and kind of markers to the consumer have actually remained pretty strong even though there's a lot of kind of fear and uncertainty when you when you watch the news and look at the macro. Let's go. Let's hear it for the American consumer. Endlessly relentless undefeated.

Uh this has been this has been fascinating. Thank you for coming on. I remember the first time I heard about you and stored was from John at Strike I think in 20 21 and he was just so incredibly uh bullish on you and uh I can see why. So thank you for coming on and congrats to the whole team on the milestone.

Means a ton. We're very proud to have strike le and uh I think uh something like 50% of the store investor base has has joined TVPN so far. I saw the Kleiner chat at SUSA. So Oh yeah. Thankful for not only send us more. Well, come back on when you have when you have interesting data too.

Doesn't you don't need to come on just for fundraising news. If you're seeing stuff that you think would be interesting to us and and the audience, love to have you back on. Thanks so much. We keep the news flowing, so we'll reach back out soon. Thanks. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Sean. See you.

A little sound [ __ ] elevate the energy at the end of a