When Kleiner Perkins led Stord’s $ 12.4 million Series A in 2019, its founders were in their early 20s and so passionate about their startup that each dropped out of their respective schools to focus on growing the business.
Fast forward two years and Stord, an Atlanta-based company that has built a cloud supply chain, is raising more capital in a round again led by Kleiner Perkins.
This time, Stord has raised $ 90 million in a Series D funding round at an after-money valuation of $ 1,125 billion, more than double the $ 510 million the company was valued at when it raised $ 65. million in Series C financing just six months ago.
In fact, today’s funding marks Stord’s third since early December 2020, when it raised its Series B led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and brings the company’s total raised since its inception in 2015 to $ 205. millions.
In addition to Kleiner Perkins, Lux Capital, D1 Capital, Palm Tree Crew, BOND, Dynamo Ventures, Founders Fund, Lineage Logistics and Susa Ventures also participated in Series D funding. Additionally, Michael Rubin, founder of Fanatics and founder of GSI Commerce; Carlos Cashman, CEO of Thrasio; Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart; and Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s CPO, put money into the round.
Founders Sean Henry, 24, and Jacob Boudreau, 23, met while Henry was at Georgia Tech and Boudreau was in online classes at Arizona State (ASU), but ran his own business, a software development company. , in Atlanta.
Over time, Stord has evolved into a cloud supply chain that can give companies a way to compete and grow with logistics, and provides an integrated platform “that is available exactly when and where they need it,” he said. Henry. Stord combines physical logistics services such as freight, warehousing and fulfillment on that platform, which aims to provide “complete visibility, rapid optimization and elastic scale” for its users.
About two months ago, Stord announced the opening of its first fulfillment center, a 386,000-square-foot facility, in Atlanta that features warehouse robotics and automation technologies. “It was the first time we were in a building ourselves running it end-to-end,” Henry said.
And today, the company announces that it has acquired Connecticut-based Fulfillment Works, a 22-year-old company with direct-to-consumer (DTC) experience and warehouses in Nevada and its home state.
With FulfillmentWorks, the company says it has grown its first-party warehouses, along with its network of more than 400 warehouse partners and 15,000 shippers.
While Stord did not disclose the amount he paid for Fulfillment Works, Henry shared some of Stord’s impressive financial metrics. The company, he said, delivered its third consecutive year of growth of more than 300% in 2020, and is on track to do so again in 2021. Stord also achieved more than $ 100 million in revenue in the first two quarters of 2021, according to Henry. , and increased its workforce from 160 people last year to more than 450 so far in 2021 (including about 150 Fulfillment Works employees). And since the fourth quarter is often when people do the most shopping online, Henry expects the three-month period to be Stord’s heaviest revenue quarter.
For a bit of context, new Stord sales increased “7x” in the second quarter of 2020 compared to the same period last year. So far in the third quarter, sales are up nearly 10 times, according to Henry.
Simply put, Stord aims to give brands a way to compete with companies like Amazon, which have set expectations for fast delivery and fulfillment. The company guarantees two-day shipping to anywhere in the country.
“The supply chain is the new competitive battlefield,” Henry said. “Today’s buying expectations set by Amazon and the rise of the omnichannel shopper have put immense pressure on companies to maintain more agile and efficient supply chains … We want all companies to have world-class supply chains, similar to Prime’s. ”
What makes Stord unique, according to Henry, is the fact that he has built what he believes to be the only end-to-end logistics network that combines physical infrastructure with software.
That’s also one of the reasons why Kleiner Perkins doubled his investment in the company.
Ilya Fushman, chairman of Stord’s board of directors and a partner at Kleiner Perkins, said even at the time of his firm’s investment in 2019, that Henry showed “incredible maturity and vision.”
At a high level, The firm was also drawn to what it described as the “incredibly large market opportunity.”
“It’s trillions of dollars in products that move with the consumer expectation that these products will reach them the same day or the next day, wherever they are,” Fushman told TechCrunch. “And while companies like Amazon have built an incredible infrastructure to do it themselves, the rest of the world hasn’t really caught up … So there is an incredible opportunity to build software and services to modernize this multi-billion dollar market.”
In other words, Fushman explained, Stord is serving as a “plug and play” or “one-stop shop” for retailers and merchants so they don’t have to spend resources on their own warehouses or build their own logistics platforms.
Stord launched the software part of its business in January 2020, and it grew 900% during the year, and today it is one of the fastest growing parts of its business.
“We build software to run our logistics and network of hundreds of warehouses,” Henry told TechCrunch. “But if companies want to use the same system for existing logistics, they can buy our software to get that kind of visibility.”
