The $3B Company Trying to Beat Amazon Prime

Stord is on track to cross $1 billion in annual revenue this year after 10Xing the business over the last four years. The goal: level the playing field with Amazon Prime for the other two-thirds of commerce on the internet. I sat down with Stord Founder & CEO Sean Henry in Cap Ferrat to talk about the company's $250M Series F, its massive bet on robotics and AI, and why he believes the biggest value from this technology may ultimately accrue to physical businesses, not the AI and robotics companies themselves. Stord now processes roughly 100 million packages a year reaching about one-third of U. S. households, representing nearly $20 billion in GMV and generating around 8 billion operational data points annually. We get into: › Why Stord is going hard on agentic robotics and AI › The data advantage behind 100M packages a year › Why humanoids may be the wrong form factor for warehouses › How acquisitions and vertical integration are accelerating Stord's scale › Going from Thiel Fellow at 19 to building a $1B+ revenue business Sean also explains the flywheel behind Stord: more volume creates greater density, lower costs and faster delivery, which in turn makes the company more competitive as it scales. His hottest take is that today's AI and robotics companies may eventually become commoditized as the technology becomes cheaper and easier to replicate internally. Instead, he thinks the value accrues to the application layer and real-world businesses putting that technology to work. Recorded at the Strike x Sourcery Summit in the South of France Sean Henry: https://x.com/seanhenry Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/oMKuy_-vXa4 https://youtu.be/oMKuy_-vXa4 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Zone https://zonefrontier.com/—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com https://zonefrontier.com/ • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  Welcome to Sorcery.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  The potential of photonics.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  The technology to interconnect these GPUs.

• 0:14Speaker 03

  Global payroll and HR platform.

• 0:16Speaker 04

  Eight billion operational data points.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Scale-ups over startups. You'd rather have a million of something than one of anything. Building the intelligence layer through the fence.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  There isn't enough power. There's not enough memory chips. We're at the end of physics of what we can still do.

• 0:40Molly O'Shea?

  Sean, welcome to Sorcery and Strike. We're out here in Monaco. Technically catfrot, but we'll just go with that. How are you doing?

• 0:50Speaker 04

  Doing great. It all blends together to me as well, but it's incredible to be here. What a beautiful venue and thanks for having me on the show.

• 0:56Molly O'Shea?

  So you're the founder of Stored. For people who don't know what Stored is, could you give us a little background?

• 1:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Stored really exists to level the playing field with Amazon Prime for the other two-thirds of commerce on the internet. When we look out there, we think that Amazon's product really is delivery and that's what all other merchants struggle to achieve. And it's what keeps all of us as consumers going to their website to check out instead of independent merchants. So we really see ourselves as the physical intelligence layer, combining all the fulfillment and delivery, all of the commerce software and all of the applied robotics and AI to achieve Amazon-level delivery costs, speeds and consumer experiences.

• 1:37Molly O'Shea?

  And so for people that aren't aware, you recently had a milestone of funding and growth. Where are we at with the business?

• 1:44Speaker 04

  Absolutely. So earlier this year, we announced a $250 million Series F. That was really to not only continue scaling the business rapidly, where this year we'll be crossing a billion in annual revenue. And over the last four years alone, we've 10x the business in terms of scale and revenue and both volume. And so it's a lot of fueling that future growth, where there's so much of an advantage of scale. Scale drives economics. It also drives density. And that's really what builds the moat in delivery, enabling Amazon-level speeds and costs. So continuing to press on the gas hard with scale. We also announced Stored Labs along with it, which is very much an application of all of the latest robotics, AI, drones,

• 2:25Speaker 04

  but also a data foundry, actually training the robotics in reverse. And so we're really excited about how really all the new technology is enabling a vertically-integrated industrial business like us to just keep separating our moat from the existing industry we live in.

• 2:41Molly O'Shea?

  Let's get into that because robotics is super hot right now. It's flying. It's like become the age of robotics. Why is now the time to go hard on that?

• 2:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you really look back over history, a lot of the problem with robotics is kind of the dumb robots, where if anything goes wrong, if any variable is changed, they can't succeed in that environment anymore. And so if you have an operationally-complex environment, where every minute or hour could be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more of productivity, that traditional robotic operation can be quite risky. And so now you're getting to this point of agentic robotics, where you're having robotics that are building real-world models that can see videos for very brief times and learn how to self-heal and get back on track. So let's say you get a slightly different size or form factor in a unit in a fulfillment center. Does all of a sudden that go down until IT can show up and code

• 3:36Speaker 04

  or do something different? Or does the robot learn on the fly with one worker walking up and holding it for three seconds and showing them how to put it in the box? And so that's really where robotics is going and why now is such a moment for it. Yet at the same time, if you look back through history and if you study kind of the Teslas and SpaceXs of the world, the whole process and equation is how do you go from refining your processes physically and operationally to then software and kind of repeat that loop over and over again? And only then can you really get the advancement you want in hardware? Because now you're applying it and really hard coding whatever that process was. So if it was under-optimized, you're going to fall behind now in a hardcoded way. That's really the issue with robotics in today's world,

• 4:19Speaker 04

  is a lot of the physical world out there that needs these robots doesn't have the basis of that best-in-class process or vertically-integrated software to go apply the robot. And so that's kind of the chasm that robotics is going to have to cross in the period ahead, now that they are getting more agentic and self-healing as well.

• 4:37Molly O'Shea?

  So what are the typical data points are you collecting through robotics that inform the software and back and forth?

• 4:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, for us, we process about eight billion operational data points a year. And that could be anything from how to place a piece of inventory in the network to how to plan for certain consumer demand, to how a unit is picked in the facility with labeling on the hands so that they can learn all of these different picking and packing patterns. There's also post-deployment training, which is videos of the robots after they've actually gone live to show those errors and to help them keep learning more and more. And so there's really a ton of data that goes into a business like Stored. And when we're processing about 100 million packages a year to about a third of US households now, almost $20 billion of GMV, that's really one of the most data-rich environments

• 5:25Speaker 04

  that all of these labs and robotics companies are trying to either simulate and learn. And that's why we have this not only head start in the e-commerce and logistics industry that we sit in, but also have such an advancement in the robotics in the early phase with these partnerships with leading companies and labs, deploying across the Stored network because of that data-rich environment. Where, let's say you deploy a camera to do the post-deployment training on a robot. Well, because of our software, we also know in that video, what's the exact dimensions and weight of the box? Where's the weight if it's placed so it's going to have balance difference because of the pack-out process? And when you can enrich these videos with not only labeling of the hands, but that level of vertically-integrated data, the learning is just so much faster.

• 6:09Molly O'Shea?

  I have to ask this. This is a selfish question because they're so popular now and creating a lot of media buzz, but do humanoid robotics belong in the factory? Or in a manufacturing warehouse? Literally anywhere?

• 6:21Speaker 04

  Over time, I think that you'll see 2X plus efficiency output in manufacturing and robotic environments due to really all these different form factors of robots. And I think humanoids are the most eye-catching when you look at a video of it as a consumer or just a human and you see this thing, that's really what gets the attention. But there's a lot of different applications of them because the history was that you could kind of either have like a mounted arm that would pick things or something on the ground like a Kiva that would move things, not two-in-one. Well, you don't actually have to have legs for a robot to move on the ground. Doesn't literally have to look like a human to have the same level of... It actually should not look like a human if you want to maximize dexterity.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  And so I think humanoids are interesting, but very much stuck in the pilot phase. And you're seeing a lot of advancement in different levels of robotics as well.

• 7:14Molly O'Shea?

  Turns out humans are very inefficient form factors.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  That might be the quote of the day.

• 7:20Molly O'Shea?

  So Stored has grown by also acquisition and rollups are kind of a hot thing as well. So are you a rollup? How do you think about acquisitions? What does the growth of the business kind of pan out to in the next couple of years?

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, when we started this business, we toured warehouses, fulfillment centers, and we were thinking about should we build the software layer on top to orchestrate a Prime-like network for other brands? And we kind of got stuck on this problem of, well, if you walk in the average warehouse, many of them are still doing paper-based picking, where a worker prints out, "Go build an order of these units", and walks around the facility either from memory or from just looking around at cards and aisles in the facility. So how can you really expect Prime-level delivery, drones and all the advancement in robotics if the industry they're going into is so far behind? So from the earliest day, we really chose to vertically-integrate and say, well, we're going to be both the software and the physical behind this

• 8:18Speaker 04

  to power that Prime-like delivery for everyone else. So that when we build this best-in-class software, we can actually apply it to the physical service it's behind. And that's really what's changed. Back when we started, physical wasn't really in vogue. It wasn't the thing to do. And now you're seeing these new applied kind of rollup companies, holdings companies and more saying, wait a second, I can build the best accounting software or whatever it may be, but if the accounting industry is slow to adopt, what if I go accrue all that advantage into my own company and my own accounting service, where I own the data, the customer and the software and AI powering this? And so really, if you think about Stored, our secret sauce is this vertically-integrated software,

• 9:01Speaker 04

  but how it's applied to real-world operations. And the flywheel of this business is that the more volume you serve, the lower costs, the faster speed and the greater trust. And if the average business out in the US is delivering for $15-plus a package in five to six business days, while Amazon's delivering for $5 a package in one to two days, if not even half a day, that's the fundamental gap that exists. And so the race to scale and spin that flywheel to level the playing field is really on and we're in the lead. And so when we look at acquisitions, we've actually been probably the most efficient on cost and also the highest outcome on uplift to these businesses because you're buying both density in the network and volume,

• 9:42Speaker 04

  but you're also applying your unit economics and your software throughout this business. And so in most of the deals we've done, we've seen five to seven or even more times uplift of the efficiency and therefore profitability of these businesses in extremely short time horizons.

• 9:59Molly O'Shea?

  Damn.

• 10:01Molly O'Shea?

  So you were a Thiel Fellow at 19?

• 10:04Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 10:04Molly O'Shea?

  You're not 19 anymore?

• 10:05Speaker 04

  Not 19 anymore. It's about 10 years ago.

• 10:08Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, you're now evolved and mature. So you started in logistics there. What made you get so interested in logistics so early on?

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. Really, if I, it's easier going backwards when you kind of look at being an entrepreneur. But a lot of times, probably a few of you around here, I'll pull out my phone and show my real live eBay account where it shows members since 2003. I was very young selling products online, really to just pay for anything in my life and get involved. And what happened was I saw the reviews go from be about the product you sold and I did or didn't like that product to just about the shipping and kind of post-click experience. Just how fast was it? What was the customer service? What was the returns? And kind of trace that to the rise of Amazon and Prime. And consumers now believing, well, I can get anything online. The difference is who actually provides that post-click experience. And so that was really the kind of trend I was looking at.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  I was a student at Georgia Tech. And my kind of funny Thiel Fellow story is I actually dropped out more than a year before I got the Thiel Fellowship. And so it was almost in arrears, but still was quite validating to my parents and my family. And I think Jake joked about it earlier, that there's a lot of different college startups you think of. And I remember our first kind of angel investor when we were students, they were like, most college students I know start a dating app to meet someone faster or an on-demand beer company to get drunk faster. Like, why are you doing logistics? So we're like, we're really just solving a problem we've seen ourselves in that if we look out at the world, it almost seems like too obvious. Like, if you ask any consumer, what's the best delivery service? Where do you want to shop online?

• 11:46Speaker 04

  The answer is Amazon. Well, why is no one doing that for the other two-thirds of the internet across e-commerce?

• 11:53Molly O'Shea?

  What was the biggest lesson you learned from the Thiel Fellowship?

• 11:56Speaker 04

  I think they really impress upon you, what is your right to win and essentially build the biggest company possible, i.e. build a monopoly over time. And I think that their whole goal is that that's really what you should strive for, not that it should exist in the sense you want to win your category. And so I think they really dug into that precision of why will this win in the long term? And for us, a lot of it comes back to that flywheel where it's really hard to catch up to the speed and cost advantage. Again, if the industry's at $15 in five or six days and Amazon's at $5 in a day and now STORE is sub $7, $8 and delivering in two days and we can deliver in one day depending

• 12:38Speaker 04

  on placement, it's very hard for that industry to catch up. And as we've spun that flywheel, we can trace our win rate in sales from sub 10% to over 50% because these brands can't find that level of capability elsewhere. And so when you're able to articulate why, as you get bigger, you actually get better as a company and it becomes harder to compete with you and you can move faster at scale. And that's why we're growing faster at scale. I think that's really what the Thiel Fellowship impresses on you and subsequently Founder's Fund, who led our rounds and joined the cap table.

• 13:10Molly O'Shea?

  As we close out, I'll make this one quick. What is your hottest take right now?

• 13:16Speaker 04

  I think there's all this obsession with kind of AI and robotics, whether you're an investor or you're a consumer and you're afraid of how that's going to displace you. And I really think that there's a fundamental gap in that I don't think the value is going to keep accruing to the AI and to the robotics. I think it actually accrues to the application layer and to the real world. And so I believe humans' lives are going to get better. I believe physical businesses like STORE are going to win and get faster and cheaper. And long term, it's actually these super fast-growth AI companies and robotics that end up commoditized by how low the cost becomes to replicate them internally across companies and for individuals even.

• 14:00Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Well, Sean, thank you so much.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 14:04Molly O'Shea?

  Cool.

• 14:07Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.