How an acquisition boosts Atlanta startup’s plan to compete with Amazon Prime

Atlanta-based logistics startup Stord has acquired Ware2Go, a subsidiary of UPS, the company announced Monday, as it seeks to get bigger in e-commerce.

Stord is both a software and a logistics company. E-commerce businesses can use Stord’s software to manage shipping and fulfillment and its network of warehouses and fulfillment centers to hold and ship inventory and process returns for those brands.

The acquisition is part of Stord’s push to “level the playing field” for small businesses against Amazon Prime, company CEO Sean Henry told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The company did not disclose the terms of the acquisition.

“The hardest part of competing with Prime for brands is scale. You inherently can’t have fast and cheap deliveries unless you have a lot of scale to spread out inventory,” Henry said.

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

Stord essentially combines the scale of a very large merchant by aggregating multiple brands under one umbrella. It has more than 500 clients, including skincare brand Proactiv, powder supplement AG1 and apparel brand True Classic.

With the Ware2Go acquisition, Stord will power close to $10 billion in e-commerce sales, Henry said, and add 21 fulfillment centers to the company’s network. The acquisition will expand its total fulfillment footprint to about 5.5 million square feet, or more than three times the size of Buckhead’s Lenox Square mall.

The acquisition is Stord’s fourth such move since 2021.

It comes just days after the company announced it had raised more than $200 million in a mix of venture capital and debt financing. Stord is now valued at $1.5 billion, a slight increase from its roughly $1.3 billion valuation in 2022.

Henry said the Ware2Go acquisition and the new funding are unrelated; the timing of the announcements just “happened alongside each other to give us so much strength in this time of uncertainty.”

But the economic uncertainty wrought by tariffs and the change in the de minimis exemption have been a boon for Stord. The prior de minimis rules exempted packages valued at less than $800 from tariffs, but the Trump administration recently ended that duty-free status.

Brands no longer have a reason to have slow international shipping in exchange for the tax savings that de minimis gave them, which has brought a flood of inventory into the U.S., Henry said.

The first three months of the year were the largest quarter of new business in Stord’s history, according to a press release.

“A lot of disruption is actually very good for Stord,” Henry said.

But he acknowledged the company still has a way to go in its ultimate mission of helping brands offer Prime-like services.

“I’d argue we’re pretty big compared to most companies and where we started,” he said, “but compared to Prime, almost everybody is pretty small.”

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