Easing The Heavy Lift

Stord’s cloud-based warehousing platform started as a student project. It could revolutionize the global supply chain.

- By Bill Saporito

Mark Buffington was stunned by the purity of the pitch. And even more so by the kid making it—a student presenting at Georgia Tech’s Create-X program for aspiring entrepreneurs. The managing partner of Panoramic Ventures in Atlanta, Buffington had heard a million pitches during his career as an investor.

This one was special. “Simplicity is really hard to obtain,” he explains, “and the way he articulated the solution was so elegant I thought, ‘This is going to be a massive winner.’ ” Buffington knew immediately that he wanted in.

That Georgia Tech student was named Sean Henry. And what he outlined that day in 2016 was the concept behind Stord: a cloud-based distributed logistics platform designed to connect companies in real-time to the hundreds of thousands of nodes that constitute the nation’s supply chain. That includes disparate and disconnected manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, third-party logistics providers, freight forwarders, warehouse operators, freight brokerages, truck drivers, and ultimately you, the customer.

With his co-founder and CTO, Jacob Boudreau, what Henry envisioned wasn’t so much a supply chain company as it was a supply change company—a single distributed network that would allow customers of all sizes to shape-shift, to expand or contract their warehouses on demand, for example, without having to build their own or enter into long-term contracts with third-party logistics companies. Essentially, Stord can form an orchestra from scattered soloists.