Stord raises $250M at $3B valuation to build the physical intelligence layer for commerce

I'm surprised. I'd like to know more about this data because it feels like there's been like an ongoing boom forever, but I guess not. Uh anyway, we have our next guest waiting in the waiting room. We have Sean Henry from Stored. He's the founder and CEO joining us today. Let's see if you can show him. Sean, how you doing? Good to be here. Thanks for having me, guys.

Welcome to the show. Uh,

very cool green screen in the background.

Not not a green screen at all. If anyone goes by, this is this is real time. This is live. Uh, I uh I I'll blame all of my performance on my three glasses of wine from Friday or Saturday night. But

there we go.

Otherwise,

there we go.

Good. Great to see you. Been too long. You got some big news today.

Yeah. What happened? For sure. John Jordy, good to be here. Thank you guys for having me. Well, we're announcing that store has raised $250 million at a $3 billion valuation.

Congratulations. Thank you guys. Thank you. Uh really the power of the physical intelligence layer for commerce. We spent a decade building this at stored and we think that the scale, the vertical integration and the ability to apply robotics and AI to the massive data set we have is just transformational for for commerce and what we're enabling for our customers. So very proud to announce this round and thrilled to be here live sharing it with TBPN.

So what's been the biggest uh growth driver? Obviously, you're expanding in your uh commerce market your offerings, but also uh is is e-commerce is commerce as a as a general category still growing? What are sort of the macro trends that are uh tailwinds for you? Yeah, if you look at our announcement, what you'll actually find is we put out a pretty public chart of revenue. And you'll find in our tweets that right around the time that AI came out about 6 months later we accelerated massively as a business which really is in part that we had spent 8 years to that point already building so much vertical integration of software from the time we're speaking to a consumer during the checkout saying order now get it on Thursday to the time we're orchestrating that network to the time we're executing it with software in a building like this across our network of nearly 100 facilities. And so when we took that vertical integration with the scale that we had maybe two years ago at that time powering about $5 billion of commerce today powering almost $17 billion of commerce. What we've been able to do is drive just faster deliveries, cheaper outcomes with all of that technology and with all of that scale combined. And so a lot of what we're using this new capital for is to keep expanding that scale. There's such a flywheel behind this business where as we get bigger, we're getting faster and cheaper to then also complete the front-end stack of software. That's been a big part of our growth the last few years is that we've built out that whole front-end consumer experience that's now interacting with tens of millions of consumers per year now that we power deliveries to over a fourth of US households. So, we're going to keep expanding that front-end software stack. And then the final big pillar of our growth is we're also announcing stored labs with this raise, which was a big part of why we raised so much capital, $250 million to apply AI and robotics to all of this realtime volume in the real physical world already running real time. And we've carved out an entire facility here in Atlanta just dedicated to testing next generation robotics and AI before we apply them and roll them out across our entire network

as Oh, sorry, D. Yeah. What is uh what what are the different why nows that you're feeling in robotics specifically around you know in in fulfillment infrastructure? Is it like uh is it happening on the model side that that there's you know other neolabs just working on the intersection of AI and robotics all the way through you know uh you know uh new actuator technology come coming out of let's say China like what is is it and I imagine it's the combination of a bunch of factors that's creating the opportunity but what are you seeing why is now the right time to invest what sounds like you know nine figures into um your own robotics and AI products Yeah, there's really two why nows going on right now. One is why now for our business and one is why now for this investment in storage labs for our business more broadly. I think the why now comes to by 2020 consumers have been taught they wanted fast affordable deliveries and that was really what was driving commerce in today's world. Since then, for the last 5 years, brands of all sizes have fought to get that Amazon-like delivery on their own channels so that they can win and retain their consumer rather than, as one of our customers said in a quote for this round, they don't want to just be a skew on Amazon. They want to be a brand and own their channels and own those direct relationships. It's actually been a really hard five or 10 years for e-commerce when you take into account all the changes with Apple and Facebook and rising ad costs, then with tariffs, then with uh or first with COVID, then with tariffs and all of these kind of compounding challenges to where the why now for us is really that these brands have been beaten down. They've faced rising cost. They faced rising competition from Amazon, from Tik Tok shop, and more. all that are just disintermediating them with their customer and harming their unit economics. And so we want to give them those Unity economics on their own website. And we even saw 2 3 weeks ago Amazon themselves announced this kind of AWS for supply chain moment. Well, we don't see that as any different that Amazon is really just subleting some capacity in their network. What brands want is truly structurally different, which is independence. They want somebody who's not using their data against them, who is driving all the branding on their packaging, their tracking and more that keeps consumers coming back to them. But it was validating. The why now for robotics and stored labs is equally interesting which is that if you kind of look at a company like a Tesla let's say and you go to the the algorithm they often put hardware and automation last because first you have to nail the processes physically and the operational excellence around those processes. Then you have to nail the software to run those processes and kind of unify those two. And that's really what stored spent the last decade building. And then only once you've gotten every efficiency out of software, every efficiency out of process, then do you go hard code with hardware, which is physical, it's expensive, it's hard to undo. And that's really where I think stored time is perfectly. And that hardware is changing. The hard-coded robotics from yesterday are now the agentic robotics of tomorrow that can learn better, adapt better. already in this building for instance all of our cameras are equipped with AI that are telling us about productivity across the facility about safety issues about compliance issues that wasn't available a few years ago so when you take our vertically integrated software with then all this hardware and sensors and vision and how it's then feeding dynamic agentic robotics we're in this like fundamentally different paradigm in automation forward but you have to have the existing software and vertical integration to capture it

how are you thinking about the different robotic opportunities? Like I think there's a lot of excitement about humanoid robots. We saw last week a demo of a robot sort of humanoid flipping over packages so that uh barcodes could be scanned. And when I'm in a manufacturing facility, I usually see much more purpose-built machines or robots for those specific tasks. if there's if there's a million boxes that just need to be tipped over, typically there will be a conveyor belt and some sort of device that just does that one task. And I'm wondering if you're seeing more energy being devoted to uh task specific robotic optimization or more generalist projects like what excites you? What is where's the next like couple years look like?

Yeah, it's a great question and I think it's where we're headed which is more general. I think the task specific automation of the past is what's uh kind of causes issues because often times the task at hand changes. You implement that robot and 6 months later with a new skew variety, new production uh change, new consumer demand pattern, all of a sudden the the model you built that ROI off of is now fundamentally changed. And if your robot can't adapt to it, you've just wasted so much capital. And so we're very much focused on this kind of new generation of more agentic, more dynamic robotics. And a big challenge in the past was that you kind of either had a robot that moved the arms and could grab something or a separate robot like the KAS of the world that were kind of moving the legs and it was just shuffling something around the facility. So now you're entering this new paradigm where what could a humanoid do in a warehouse if you could move the top arms and the bottom legs at the same time and really see this new level of movement going on in a facility. But it's in part why we're so excited because our foundational insight when we began store beyond the kind of consumer trend and that every brand was going to need these Amazon capabilities was the reason brands can't do this is that traditionally physical logistics and logistics software and then the software that serves a brand and speaks to the consumer are all sold separately. and you're trying to figure out how to integrate all this together and tie it into the physical atoms moving out there in the physical world. And so our thesis was well if we build all of those together, the infrastructure, the operating software and the consumerf facing software, we will be the platform that can iterate off of these. And right now our biggest costs are essentially either decisions, labor or deliveries. And with how our decisions are going from ML to AI, we're getting faster and cheaper than our industry because of that proprietary software. With how robotics are going from hardcoded to agentic, we're getting faster and cheaper at a faster pace than the industry. And even things like dronebased delivery, it's such an awesome capability and incredible uh category of companies and what's happening there. But you still need inventory everywhere to be able to deliver from a drone which has a limited radius. And you need that front-end consumer experience software telling the consumer drone delivery is available. And storage is what controls that part of the stack that then extends out to then enable things like drones. So the shortest statement is we kind of see ourselves as the vertically integrated platform that can first take advantage of a lot of these emerging technologies because our industry is so far behind us.

Talk about international expansion. Uh where are where are you live today? Where do you think you'll be in 12 to 18 months? Like what what what uh what international opportunities are exciting to you?

Yeah. So, we're very large in the US, approaching 100 million packages a year to about a fourth of US households this year.

Uh internationally, Canada's our next biggest market, followed by Europe and the UK. We're expanding with recent launches in both China and Australia and that's taking US brands internationally to say, "Hey, we can already ship your products globally to over 180 countries. We do that every single year." But what if you actually wanted to hold your inventory locally in those markets and deliver locally? So if you step back when you think of stored as saying we are the physical intelligence layer for commerce what that means is really we're trying to give all the physical infrastructure all the software tools all the robotics and all the AI that you need to sell anywhere and deliver to those consumers and so already today our platform is infused at every level with natural language AI where I only bring that up because one of the most fun questions we've seen brands asking is where should I expand globally based on where all consumers are already purchasing from.

Yeah. Is China an underrated opportunity for independent brands? Like we were just reflecting on the fact that the Tesla Model Y is the bestselling electric car in China. Uh it's obviously an Americanmade, American developed vehicle, and I'm wondering if that's not on the top of anyone's mind, but is there some sort of opportunity there?

I think you may be on to something. That's not necessarily why we expanded into China. uh we are very customer obsessed and so we tend to follow our customers globally and to your point we went with one of the fastest growing US brands who wanted to access consumers in China and expanded with them and so I think often times we think about the inverse which is hey if I launch a brand here my my product my IP or other is going to be quickly replicated internationally in markets like China well there may be the opposite which is the end consumer there may actually want that brand from other markets like the like the US. I think there's just this often underestimated fact of opening up more channels tends to decrease your CAC on your first channel cuz what we see is let's say a brand goes into a new marketplace, a new store, a new international market and therefore the audience just gets larger and larger and larger who's seen them at least once and so then your ad effectivity goes up and so your CAC organically continues to go down.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on the fundraising update. Thank you so much for coming on the show and have a great rest of your day.

Talk to you soon. Good to see you again until our next runin.

See you later. Bye.

Up next, we have Eric Reese. The author of Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. Eric is in the waiting room. We'll bring him in in just a minute. Uh you probably know him from his first book, The Lean