Sean HenryCo-founder & CEO

Stord is the physical intelligence layer for commerce. We combine physical infrastructure for shipping and fulfillment with software and applied AI. This allows independent brands to compete with Amazon Prime on consumer experience, shipping speed, and cost across all their sales channels.

We power everything after checkout. This includes shipping options, tracking, returns portals, and automated messaging. Physically, we manage the package from the warehouse rack to packing and final delivery to the consumer's doorstep, handling millions of shipments annually.

Logistics is a massive, quiet industry. We noticed reviews on eBay and Amazon shifting from product quality to the shipping experience. We realized consumers wanted Prime-level trust everywhere, and that delivery is a key function of customer acquisition and repeat shopping.

I was homeschooled in 2003 and spent all day on the computer. I started selling electronics, Game Boys, and car parts on eBay when I was seven. That taught me how critical the logistics loop was and how hard it was to manage shipping as a small business.

I interned at a billion-dollar automotive manufacturer and saw that their shipping and logistics operations were even worse than mine at a small scale. I realized that large companies had not solved this problem, which inspired me to build a general solution.

It was scary to hire employees, raise capital, and find customers at eighteen. We started Stord during my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I balanced classes with work until we had several employees, at which point I chose to drop out and commit fully.

My co-founder and I were named when we were twenty-one. We were actually nervous because we did not want our employees or customers to think we were too young. Fortunately, it became a superpower that helped us hire seasoned experts to complement our technology.

Marketplaces disintermediate you from your customer. You lose margin, you do not get customer data, and you cannot build a branded relationship. Additionally, when customers search for your product, Amazon displays ads for your competitors, funding your own competition.

A typical e-commerce brand spends ten to fifteen percent of its revenue on shipping. We reduce that to five to ten percent, allowing the brand to keep the remaining margin. Amazon marketplace fees and shipping costs often consume twenty to forty percent of revenue.

We support about a thousand brands, representing seventeen billion USD in commerce. Notable partners include Athletic Greens, Fanatics, Quince, True Classic, Unilever, Procter and Gamble, and Proactiv, reaching about a fourth of all United States households.

As we grew from an asset-light software network to owning physical facilities and robotics, we needed someone who had managed multi-billion dollar budgets at Amazon. Steve joined us early on to combine our technology with established operational experience.

Disruptions like pandemic surges, trade tariffs, and international shipping delays teach brands that managing logistics internally is too risky. Our cloud-based network distributes risk, allowing brands to self-heal and share capacities and labor dynamically.

The Series F funds are split between expanding our global warehousing infrastructure, developing consumer-facing checkout software, scaling warehouse automation, and investing in Stord Labs to train physical AI models using our operational datasets.

Stord Labs is our physical AI data foundry. We generate eight billion data points annually across thousands of workers and facilities. We partner with robotics and model companies, using our real-world operational data to train their models.

In ten years, we want to be the independent infrastructure choice for e-commerce. By giving merchants Amazon-level logistics capabilities on their own sites, we give consumers the confidence to shop across the open internet rather than relying on one marketplace.

Obsess over the customer rather than just the problem you think you are solving. Be prepared to learn and iterate daily. Do not be afraid of massive, old industries, and start with a single, strategic thread that you can compound over time.