$250M at $3B. The Physical Intelligence Layer for Commerce

Stord has raised $250M at a $3B valuation to build the commerce infrastructure that gives any independent brand the power to surpass Prime. We are the scaled leader across the full commerce stack, with deep vertical integration and network effects that compound with every order. Our network powers over $15B of GMV for over 1,000 brands, approaching one-fourth of US households annually. Today, we are launching Stord Labs signaling our commitment to advancing physical intelligence and robotics across our network. 

Amazon controls more than a third of U.S. online commerce, and it’s worth being precise about why. Not because their storefront is better. Not because their payments are better. Not because their ads are better.

Amazon wins because of delivery. Prime reset consumer expectations permanently: order by noon, arrive by tomorrow, tracked to the minute, with a promise that means something. Every consumer who has experienced Prime now carries that expectation to every other checkout, on every other website, for every other brand. That advantage has been Amazon’s alone.

For any merchant building their brand today, selling through a third-party marketplace is a choice that wins today and loses tomorrow. The moment a platform controls your customer, your margin compresses, your data disappears, and your brand becomes a commodity. When a brand wins a customer directly, they capture the full margin, the full data, and the full relationship. When that same customer migrates to a marketplace, they can pay up to 40% in fees, their data disappears, and the next time that consumer shops, they’re served a cheaper competitor on the same page.

The only way to surpass Prime is to build something that goes beyond it, built for everyone else, and that requires infrastructure that, until Stord, did not exist for independent brands.

That is what we’re announcing today: a $250M Series F at a $3 billion valuation, and alongside it, Stord Labs, our dedicated commitment to advancing physical intelligence, robotics, and next-generation AI for independent commerce.

1. The brands building on this platform.

The brands that are winning in independent commerce made a deliberate choice: to own their customer relationship directly rather than rent access to it through a marketplace. That choice is only as powerful as the infrastructure behind it. Commerce is a multi-trillion dollar category, and the brands that will define the next decade are the ones building direct, defensible relationships with their consumers, not the ones ceding that relationship to a platform.

Over 1,000 brands have made this bet with Stord, and the results are clear: they are winning.

AG1 ships a subscription supplement to consumers who have built their health routine around receiving it, where an on-time delivery doesn’t just fulfill an order, it powers a daily commitment to health. True Classic built one of the fastest-growing apparel brands in the country through direct channels and needs operations that hold up when demand spikes. Seed Health competes on a premium where the brand experience is inseparable from the product’s value.

Fanatics, IM8, Hairstory, Aloha, Monos, American Giant, goodr, Jolie, Native, Fatty15,  each one growing fast, each one protecting a direct consumer relationship they refuse to compromise on. Together, they’re part of a network whose packages now touch nearly one in four U.S. households every year.

What these brands need is not a logistics provider. They need a partner who shows an accurate delivery promise at checkout and keeps it. Who turns the unboxing into a brand moment. Who converts a return into a retained customer. Traditional fulfillment providers stop at closing the box. Stord extends across every consumer touchpoint, pre-purchase through post-delivery, because that is where the consumer relationship is won or lost. That is what it means to be The Consumer Experience Company.

For Jolie, a premium showerhead brand where the post-purchase experience is inseparable from the product itself, that extends all the way into how their team operates day to day — including how AI has changed the speed at which they can make decisions.

As True Classic expanded from DTC into true omnichannel — launching in Costco, Sam’s Club, Target, and its own retail stores — the complexity of managing kitting, multi-retailer compliance, and high-velocity D2C shipping from a single network would have broken most fulfillment relationships. It became a competitive advantage instead.

Monos, the premium travel brand, came to Stord needing the kind of operational certainty that lets a fast-growing brand actually plan around its supply chain rather than react to it.

2. Vertical integration and scale enable physical intelligence.

The fulfillment network, backed by industrial scale and operational excellence, is the physical foundation. The software layer, vertically integrated at every level of our stack, is what turns that foundation into a compounding advantage. And the intelligence layer is what makes that advantage accelerate with every order, every data point, and every customer interaction.

Stord built its technology from the inside out: the WMS was built by engineers inside operating warehouses, the TMS hardened against real parcel volume, the OMS built to orchestrate a live multi-node network, and the front-end Consumer Experience platform built by interacting with millions of consumers every year. When we layer AI on top of these systems, the intelligence learns from real data, optimizes real-world outcomes, and executes against reality, not a model. 

Stord’s growth has a clear inflection point that maps exactly to the rise of AI. Our acceleration began in 2023, roughly six months after AI became a production-grade tool, and our vertical integration is precisely why we could capture that opportunity faster than the broader industry

The results of our commitment to AI are visible across the business: the team ships product faster, customers answer operational questions in natural language rather than running reports, and the network is getting faster and cheaper per order.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Experience suite, Resolve, Protect, Unbox, Renew, and Engage, gives brands capabilities that directly improve conversion, retention, and lifetime value. We expanded our AI suite with Chat, Search, and Feed, with agents and an MCP server on the near horizon. The brands on the platform are noticing, and making decisions based on it.

3. Stord Labs: building the Physical Intelligence layer.

Stord Labs is a 10,000 square foot physical intelligence lab where we test AI, robotics, and operational innovations against real orders before deploying them across our network.

Physical intelligence cannot be built in simulation. It has to be built on real orders, with real constraints, against real operational complexity. Stord Labs gives us that environment, a live testbed where new robotics configurations, AI-driven pick path optimizations, and next-generation hardware designs are validated before they touch our broader network of nearly 100 facilities.

The advantage here is structural. Most companies testing robotics are doing so in controlled environments with synthetic data. Stord Labs runs against $15 billion in annual GMV worth of real orders, which means the AI we develop there is trained on the richest operational dataset in independent commerce. Stord’s platform generates 8 billion operational events annually. That is the dataset our models train on, and it gets richer with every order.

Every robotics deployment, every automation improvement, every efficiency gain rolls out to a network that has already proven it can execute at scale, compounding the impact immediately.

4. The momentum.

For ten years, we have methodically built the infrastructure, technology, and scale from the ground up. The company is approaching $1 billion in revenue, having grown more than 10x over the past four years. 

It took us roughly four years to hit our first $100M; today we consistently add more than that every three months. 

We process over $15B in GMV annually. Since launching StordAI in March, we have seen over 100,000 unique interactions across 350+ brands that have quickly become power users out of our broader base. 

Our software business tripled in 2025 and is growing faster than our overall business. Software bookings more than doubled in Q1 2026 alone, with 7 live products seeing accelerating adoption. We have nearly doubled the engineering team while nearly tripling the speed and output of product delivery.

Stord has completed 8 acquisitions, each exceeding its targets, because the same platform, operational excellence, and applied intelligence powering Stord's network rapidly transforms every facility and customer base it acquires. Today, our network includes more than 4,000 talented people, with over 200 dedicated to software engineering, product, data science, and physical infrastructure and robotics. 

5. The flywheel and why it never stops compounding.

Every new brand that joins the Stord network improves outcomes for every brand already on it, and that compounding effect is showing up directly in how we compete and win.

More volume means better economies of scale for everyone. More facilities means more precise inventory placement and faster delivery times. More data means smarter routing, better demand forecasting, and more accurate delivery promises. More accurate promises mean more consumer trust, which means more repeat purchases, which feeds more volume.

This is not a simple software network effect. It is a physical network effect layered with a software and data advantage, and the combination is what makes it durable.

You cannot replicate a physical fulfillment network with code. You cannot replicate years of operational excellence and culture built from the ground up from behind a screen. You cannot substitute the billions of data points across our network continuously training our models. And you cannot hack your way to the tens of millions of U.S. consumers who have seen Stord on their doorstep.

The flywheel took a decade to reach the velocity it has today, and it is still accelerating. As the flywheel spins, our advantage accelerates, and is proven by our industry-shattering win rate. 

The opportunity ahead.

The largest and most celebrated companies being built today—SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, Waymo, Atoms, Figure AI—operate at the intersection of software intelligence and physical execution. 

Their advantages compound in a way that pure software cannot replicate, because building and operating physical systems at scale creates a foundation that is genuinely hard to copy. 

The market has historically underestimated the complexity and defensibility of physical infrastructure at scale, and that underestimation is a meaningful part of what has allowed Stord to reach a position that is difficult to replicate. We prefer to be underestimated. 

Stord is one of the leading physical AI companies being built today, competing in one of the largest markets in the world. This is a trillion dollar opportunity. 

Every order that moves through our network ends with a real person waiting on a doorstep, tracking a package, opening a box. We built the operating system for that moment. We proved the flywheel. We proved operational excellence and culture. We assembled a world-class team of engineers, operators, and builders to keep that promise at scale. Now, AI, robotics, and even drone and robot-based delivery become the next frontier, not as technology for its own sake, but as tools to make that experience faster, cheaper, and more reliable than consumers ever thought possible. Every one of them deepens the physical intelligence layer and improves outcomes for every brand on the network.

We are The Consumer Experience Company. The physical intelligence layer for independent commerce is here. We have never been more certain of where this goes, or more excited to build it.

Onward,

Sean