ATLANTA, Dec. 2, 2020 -- Today, we are excited to share that Stord has raised a $31M Series B led by Founders Fund. This new funding will fuel our growth as we build the first end-to-end cloud supply chain.

As consumers, we have become accustomed to ever-improving delivery quality and speed driven by the infrastructure and capabilities of today’s leading retailers. While the delivery of the items we buy presents a seamless experience on the surface, behind the scenes it is a starkly different reality.

The products that show up on our door-step have traveled through a complex web of emails, spreadsheets, and outdated enterprise systems which coordinate a product's journey across different factories, trucks, fulfillment centers, delivery drivers, and more. A small error on a pen-and-paper warehouse receipt at one stop along this journey can disrupt the entire system, leaving a customer frustrated and abandoning a brand in favor of one that delivers more reliably.  

While behemoths like Amazon have spent decades building their logistics network and technology in-house, the average brand is stuck trying to compete with a prime-like experience by piecing together a mix of expensive fulfillment centers, third party logistics providers with rigid contracts, and complex enterprise software. Rolling out software across an enterprise is hard enough, but rolling out software across a distributed supply chain with dozens of different logistics providers and manufacturers is nearly impossible. While many brands are able to ‘get by’ with legacy ERP systems and long term fulfillment center leases, it creates a fragile logistics setup that is not adaptable to change, making it impossible to compete in a world where logistics has become a corner-stone for consumer experience. 

Today’s supply chains are inflexible and prone to mistakes, yet consumers' needs are highly dynamic—a reality that brands of all sizes were reminded of in 2020 as the country navigated a pandemic and e-commerce volumes soared.

Brands have to serve rapidly changing demand patterns across dozens of channels such as retail, e-commerce, wholesale, and more. While each and every brand can seek to solve this challenge on their own, it is a massively capital and infrastructure intensive undertaking, and distracts them from building great products to delight their customers.

Instead, today’s leading brands are looking for a platform that can provide the infrastructure, scale, and expertise needed to meet their customer needs—without having to build their own in-house supply chain from scratch. 

At Stord, our mission is to provide our best-in-class logistics network and software to shippers so they can build fast, scalable, technology-driven supply chains at a fraction of the cost (and even less time) it would take for them to build themselves. We call this the cloud supply chain. 

Whereas building a traditional supply chain requires investing substantial time and money in physical infrastructure, complex legacy software, and human expertise, our cloud-supply chain is built to fundamentally abstract these complexities. Stord provides brands a cloud-based platform that offers complex logistics services, with service levels typically only available for the largest brands, and with utility-like pay-as-you-go pricing that a brand can leverage from startup to enterprise-level scale.

We believe that we can democratize the heightened consumer experience that is today only available to the largest brands. If successful in converting the traditional supply chain paradigm, we will help even the playing field for brands of all sizes to provide their customers with delightful experiences, and remove massive inefficiencies from the $2T+ global logistics industry.  

While this has been our mission from day one, the need for our solution in the market could not be more clear. Over the last year, our team has grown from 40 to over 125 employees, our logistics revenue has grown nearly 500%, our software segment has grown over 900%, our shipment volume has grown more than 15,000%, and we are just getting started. 

To keep up with customer demand for our end-to-end cloud supply chain platform, we have been busy this past year. From launching our software platform and integration offerings on top of our supply chain services, incorporating freight and last mile into our network, and launching e-commerce fulfillment capabilities to help omnichannel brands, we have been relentlessly focused on the needs of our customers. Today, Stord provides the software capabilities and logistics network to move an omnichannel shippers product end-to-end—from the time it arrives at a port or leaves a manufacturing line, to its destination of a consumer, retailer, or other business—through a fully integrated experience with greater visibility, heightened flexibility, lower cost, and faster delivery. 

Re-architecting one of the worlds largest and most outdated industries is no small feat, requiring the right capital as well as expertise around the table. To fulfill this mission, we’re excited to welcome Founders Fund to our journey, who has a long track-record partnering with companies to disrupt massive industries. Our Series B also included significant participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Susa Ventures, and Dynamo, as well as participation from strategic investors such as Jeffrey Raider at Good Friends Fund (Co-Founder of Harrys and Warby Parker), Karen Page at B Capital Group via its Ascent Fund (an early-stage, partner-backed fund), and BoxGroup. Our world-class investors collectively provide us the expertise needed to rebuild a massive category while partnering with both sophisticated enterprise brands as well as rapidly growing e-commerce companies. 

While this investment serves as great validation of our mission and what we have built so far, we are only just beginning. There is an enormous amount to do, and we will remain relentlessly obsessed with the needs of our customers’ for decades to come—providing them with lower costs, greater efficiency, and more ways to reach their end customers. 

A sincere thank you is owed to our customers who have trusted us to optimize and improve their supply chains, and to our team for their obsession with making our customers successful. 

This is a significant milestone and a testament to our hard work, but it’s only the beginning. 

Onward,

Sean