Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services

Bloomberg. TechCrunch. Reuters. Fortune Term Sheet. Axios. Sourcing Journal. WSJ Pro VC. They all covered the same story. Not because of a funding round. Because they recognized that something genuinely new is here. The physical intelligence layer for independent commerce is real, it is at scale, and it is here. Every brand that refuses to give away their customer relationship to a marketplace now has the infrastructure to compete on their own terms. Ten years of building to this moment. And we are just getting started.

Tesla doesn't put automation first. Neither did we. Elon Musk has an equation for building physical systems. It has built trillions in value. It goes: question the process, delete what doesn't need to exist, simplify, optimize, then automate. Automation is the last step, not the first. Because automating a broken process just makes the broken process faster. That sequence is why Stord Labs exists right now. We spent a decade unifying the stack. One software layer from consumer checkout to the warehouse floor to the last-mile carrier across nearly 100 facilities. The moment that foundation was in place, AI on top of it compounded differently than AI on top of fragmented systems. The same logic applies to robotics. The hard-coded automation of the last decade breaks the moment demand patterns shift. New SKU variety. New consumer behavior. And suddenly the ROI model you built the whole thing around is gone, and the robot can't adapt. Agentic robotics can. But only if the software underneath them is unified enough to give them something real to learn from. That is a decade of work. And almost nobody in this industry has done it. The window to deploy physical intelligence at this scale, on a foundation this unified, is not open to everyone. It is open to Stord because we earned it. We didn't rush to hardware. We methodically earned the right to it.

Ten years ago I started Stord with a belief: that the physical experience of receiving an order was as important to the consumer as the product itself, and that nobody had built the infrastructure to make that possible for independent brands. On Bloomberg last night, I was asked why Amazon runs more than a third of U.S. e-commerce. The answer isn't their storefront or their payments. It's because we trust their deliveries. That trust is built on physical infrastructure at scale with technology and intelligence on top. Nine of the ten largest U.S. companies by revenue operate physical networks at scale. The most defensible companies in the world are built at the intersection of software intelligence and physical execution. Pure software cannot replicate what that combination actually compounds into. That is the physical intelligence layer for commerce. And it is what Stord is building for every independent brand. We are taking e-commerce further through Stord Labs. A physical intelligence environment at our Atlanta headquarters where we develop and validate AI and robotics against real operational complexity before it touches a single brand's orders. These improvements cannot be built in simulation. The only way to develop AI that actually works in the physical world is to develop it against the physical reality it will operate in. Because our network runs on one unified technology stack across nearly 100 facilities worldwide, what proves out in Atlanta deploys everywhere immediately. Every improvement compounds across the full platform. Every brand on Stord benefits from R&D they did not have to fund or absorb the risk of testing themselves. The physical intelligence layer gets stronger with every order. We are just getting started. Watch my full conversation on Bloomberg The Close with Katie Greifeld and Romaine Bostick, CFA.

Ten years ago I started Stord with a simple belief: that the physical experience of receiving an order was as important to the consumer experience as the product itself, and that nobody had built the infrastructure to make that possible for independent brands. Today, Stord raises $250 million at a $3 billion valuation. And I believe we have proven that belief was right. Amazon controls more than a third of U.S. online commerce, and the reason isn't their storefront or their payments. It's delivery. Prime permanently reset consumer expectations, and every consumer now carries those expectations to every brand they shop. For decades, every independent brand has been left to compete against that standard on their own.That is what Stord is built to solve, and this raise is the market’s validation that the opportunity is real, and that our foundation is working. “Amazon makes you feel like a SKU. Stord makes us feel like a brand. That’s the gap, and Stord is exactly built to fill it.” — Imran J., doingwell Over 1,000 brands. Over $15 billion in GMV powered annually. Packages touch nearly one in four U.S. households every year. A software business that tripled last year and is accelerating. 8 billion data points feeding our models annually. And a foundation that combines scale, vertical integration, and AI to create leading consumer experiences, one that gets stronger with every order. And today, we launch Stord Labs, our dedicated environment for advancing AI, robotics, and operational innovation across our network with the speed that only a unified technology and operational stack makes possible. The largest and most defensible companies being built today operate at the intersection of software intelligence and physical execution. In commerce, Amazon and Walmart are both trillion-dollar businesses built on unmatched physical infrastructure. Consider this: 9 of the 10 largest US companies by revenue operate physical networks at scale. Physical foundations built with the right technology on top compound in ways that pure software cannot replicate. That is the advantage Stord is building. This raise is not the destination, it is fuel on our mission. And we are just getting started. Thank you  to every brand that trusted us with their consumer relationship. And to every Stordian who built this. The future at Stord is even more exciting than the past ten years.

25 to 35% of support tickets are "where is my order?" During peak, that number exceeds 50%. Each investigation takes 5 to 15 minutes. Across carriers, across nodes, across systems that weren't built to talk to each other. StordAI Chat answers the same question in seconds. It's trained on tens of millions of real shipment events flowing through our network. Real orders, real carrier events, and real fulfillment history. Ask it why an order was delayed. Ask it what inventory is truly available to promise before you run a promotion. Ask it which SKUs are trending toward stockout this week. It knows the answer because it lives inside the operation. Not on top of it. StordAI Chat is free for every Stord customer. The question your team spent an hour on this morning should have taken seconds. Ask. Answer. Action.

Mark Wang's team used to spend nights in a San Francisco office manually printing labels to ship the first Capture Clips to Peak Design's Kickstarter backers. That was 2011. Scrappy, founder-energy, every order personal. Nine global distribution centers, five retail stores, and a US fulfillment network across three separate vendors later, the manual work was gone, but a different kind of friction had replaced it. Disconnected systems, competing processes, and a team spending more time hunting for information than serving customers. Fragmented infrastructure is a growth tax. You just don't pay it in dollars. You pay it in your team's time, every hour spent managing vendors instead of moving the business forward. Peak Design partnered with Stord to start changing that. They ran a rapid NetSuite integration with our open API. They added a new East Coast node, cutting transit times for their customers immediately. And they did it without missing a single shipping window. What Mark said at the end of our onboarding stays with me: "If we can consolidate and make it easier for my operations team, then maybe instead of nine warehouses, we can have twenty-plus. We just have to make it easy." That's the right framing. Fulfillment infrastructure should be the foundation that makes scale possible, not the ceiling that stops it. Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/egb_t2jF

We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.