Stord (company)

Stord is an Atlanta, Georgia-based company founded by Sean Henry and Jacob Boudreau in October of 2015 to solve storage concerns in the startup sector. Stord is a software platform with a network of warehouses with excess capacity for additional fulfillment and distribution. The software is inclusive for all warehouse affiliations, each storage facility registered with Stord is bound to a set of procedures and prices, which are standardized across all facilities. Customers then use the software to gain data analytics, insights, and optimization strategies. Stord, as a company, does not own any warehouses but instead partners with warehouses with the aforementioned additional capacities.

Initially, at conception, Stord was a B2C company but later shifted to a B2B business model to address a lack of accessible storage for startup consumer goods that required fulfillment and distribution. The company only pivoted to a B2B model after developing a relationship with the Chatanooga-based Dynamo accelerator, a supply-chain accelerator sponsored by UPS, GE, Ryder, and other organizations. Henry (19 at the time) began communicating with some of the Dynamo sponsors in a mentorship capacity and moved to B2B storage. Henry was a freshman at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) at the time. He later recruited Jacob Boudreau (18 at the time) as CTO and co-founder in 2016 as a recent high school graduate running a web development agency independently.

The Stord software was built in-house after the company partnered with a customer in its infancy. During the partnership, the Stord employees tracked and watched the supply-chain communications and concluded that roughly 25 minutes was spent human-to-human facing through phone calls, emails, and fax to fulfill a small inventory requirement from a warehouse. Stord then decided that software should be built to address the chain of communications spanning over three different delivery methods to combine them in one software program. The software can be integrated into existing operations and is cloud-based, updating in real-time, enabling clients to manage inventory on a global scale.

By 2018, Stord was partnered with over 9,000 warehouses across the United States, including 6,000 locally-owned regional mom-and-pop storage facilities and roughly 3,000 warehouses owned by larger companies like Prologis. In an interview with Forbes, Henry stated that the mom-and-pop warehouses were best suited for meeting client demands by fulfilling local retail needs. The corporate-owned warehouses are best suited for enterprise operations due to pre-existing software and machinery. By 2020, there were warehouse locations in 47 of the 48 continental US states.