Today marks a significant milestone for STORD’s customers, partners, and team members.
We are thrilled to confirm the news that STORD has closed a $12.3M Series A funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins and joined by existing investors including Susa Ventures and Dynamo, among others. This brings our total capital raised to-date to $15 million.
In conjunction with this round, we are announcing our new model and a new category of distribution — Networked Distribution — which will further our mission to empower modern shippers to move products brilliantly.
I’ve included my thoughts on what this means to our team, customers, and the market as a whole below.
The Trouble with Distribution Today
If you look around, nearly everything we touch runs through a global supply chain system. As customer expectations for delivery have increased exponentially in the last decade, there has been a massive burden placed on supply chain systems to perform. Whether it is a retailer ordering new stock from a supplier or a CPG brand replenishing raw materials, buyers want their products quicker and with lower shipping costs.
To accomplish this, shippers have shifted to keeping product closer to customers across the country by outsourcing their warehousing and distribution to local third-party logistics providers. While utilizing 3PLs has helped increase distribution speed, it has also created an operational nightmare for shippers, who find themselves managing dozens of vendors, locked into long-term contracts, and without software to manage inventory or data to make real-time decisions.
As a result, each year shippers move trillions of dollars of goods through an inefficient and costly logistics system that’s held together by manual labor, spreadsheets, phone calls, and a myriad of emails.
While there has been a rise of “on-demand” companies and “marketplaces” that provide shippers a temporary band-aid for inventory overflow, the real problem that shippers face clearly goes much deeper than spot capacity.
The Solution: Networked Distribution
Our team at STORD believes that shippers deserve a better distribution experience. One that’s agile instead of rigid, automated instead of manual, and intelligent rather than opaque. A ‘next generation’ distribution experience transformed by technology and innovation.
Simultaneously, modern shippers require logistics expertise, strategy, and partnership to successfully navigate supply chains that are complex, brittle, and ever-changing. Those shippers that effectively harness technology and innovation to amplify rather than replace these crucial human elements will be the winners.
At the intersection of these requirements, Networked Distribution was born — a model that we’re proud to pioneer, and a new category that we’re excited to lead.
Combining technology and data, a vast network of 3PLs, and high-touch support and logistics expertise — all managed through a software interface — Networked Distribution gives shippers a central hub with one network, one platform, and one partner to simplify all warehousing and transportation.
Our Growth
In the last year, we have grown revenue roughly 10x and expanded our team from 5 employees in a small co-working space to surpass 30 in our own HQ in the heart of Atlanta’s thriving technology community.
At the same time, we’ve been both honored and humbled to receive awards and recognition from the likes of Forbes, Inc., the Wall Street Journal, Supply & Demand Chain Executive, American Shipper, Atlanta Business Chronicle, and the Technology Association of Georgia.
None of this growth would have been possible without the partnership from our incredible customers. STORD has been fortunate to work with some of the leading enterprise brands, helping them move their products globally, while dramatically reducing time per order, last mile costs, damage and errors, and late deliveries.
For example, we are fortunate to partner with one of the largest beverage companies in America who came to us because — with 20+ different 3PLs across the country to manage, increasing last-mile costs, and fluctuating demand from their customers — distribution was an uphill climb. With STORD, they have eliminated the need to manage 20+ providers by meeting their warehousing and transportation needs through a single network. They increased speed-to-market. And, through one integration to STORD’s platform, they can easily manage it all with real-time optimization and true visibility across all nodes in their supply chain.
Moving Forward
Today, we move over $200M of product every month — undeniable proof of the power of our Networked Distribution model. While this number is substantial and growing, our journey is just getting started. The $12.3M investment will help us officially pioneer and scale this new category.
With this new infusion of capital, we’ll aggressively expand our network of warehouses, distribution centers, and transportation partners to extend our network coverage and service capabilities.
We’ll grow our engineering organization to boost platform innovation, providing shippers and warehouse partners more visibility and automation than ever before.
At the same time, we’ll continue to invest in people — the logistics talent needed to provide best-in-class services and support to meet the complex, global logistics requirements of our customers. We intend to hire more than 50 new team members before 2020. And we aim to build a staple technology brand in Atlanta — providing growth opportunities and a great place to work for the talented and innovative people in our vibrant city.
Our New Investment Partner
Fixing a large-scale, global problem requires ingenuity and hard work, but also capital and expertise.
We’re thrilled to partner with a storied investment firm like Kleiner Perkins, one of the largest and most established venture capital firms in the country. Our partnership with their team adds key expertise garnered from their long history of helping pioneers build long-term, multi-billion-dollar technology companies — household brands like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Spotify.
As part of this, we could not be more excited to welcome Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins, to our board of directors. We are also incredibly proud to receive continued support from existing investors such as Susa Ventures, Dynamo, and more.
This $12.3M Series A comes 11 months after we announced our $2.4M seed round—which was co-led by Susa Ventures and Dynamo and included investments from Chris Klaus, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and the Atlanta-based corporate-backed fund, Engage.
Thank You
Our team is passionate about living at the intersection of global logistics and enterprise software. This investment will serve as a great foundation for us to transform the $163 billion dollar warehousing and distribution industry, and impact the $1.5 trillion dollar logistics and supply chain industry as a whole.
A sincere thank you to our new and current investors, our incredible team, our network of service providers, and our customers who have chosen to partner with us on this journey. We couldn’t be more grateful.
This is a significant milestone and a testament to our hard work, but we are all looking forward to the future and recognize that we are only at the beginning.
Onward,
Sean
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Some words from our investment partners:
