Strike Capital retweeted
Stord just made our largest acquisition yet, acquiring AMS Fulfillment.
Our 12th acquisition adds 10M+ annual orders and 1.3M square feet to our network infrastructure.
Commerce is a scale game. More volume means lower costs, faster delivery, and more data powering smarter AI and automation.
Every acquisition accelerates that flywheel, and enables us to grow even faster organically. And we're still accelerating.
Stord has been more successful with acquisitions than modern "AI roll-ups." We have a powerful organic growth engine, clear benefits from scale, and the same opportunity to transform operations through applied AI.
Acquisitions accelerate an already compounding business, rather than being the business itself. There's a lot more to unpack on our acquisition playbook and why it works so elegantly.
Will share more on that soon.
Strike Capital retweeted
Pleased to share that we've won an enterprise-wide Army contract to modernize decades-old components.
Over the past two years, our team has built the tech and muscle to re-engineer the parts our planes, ships, and tanks depend on and make them a lot easier to manufacture.
We have also seen firsthand what America lost by trading hardware engineering for legal and financial engineering. Qualifying a single component can now take as long as building an entire aircraft once did.
Our country simply can't afford this reality anymore. Our partnership here is the first step toward restoring America's engineering strength across its critical supply chains. More to come soon...
Amca has been awarded a contract by the @USArmy, establishing an enterprise-wide partnership with Army Materiel Command for rapid engineering, qualification, and component production.
This is the first partnership of its kind, designed to increase readiness for a priority missile system by re-engineering and improving manufacturability of critical components and subsystems.
We're grateful for the Army’s trust, urgency, and leadership, and look forward to re-engineering American industry together.
Strike Capital retweeted
Europe doesn’t have a defense innovation problem. It has an industrial scale problem.
Aistis is right: in autonomous warfare, cost and volume matter as much as capability.
That’s where the next generation of European defense champions will be built.
Palantir’s 2nd employee in Europe, Aistis Šimaitis, says the #1 issue in autonomous warfare today is cost:
“Everything has to become cheaper.”
“If a radio could cost $30,000 four years ago for the military, and that was acceptable, this is no longer acceptable when you’re talking about autonomous mass technologies & robots in the hundreds & tens of thousands.”
“A lot of these components have to go significantly cheaper in price & significantly higher in scale.”
Strike Capital retweeted
Thanks for having us!
Once a year, we bring together the friends and founders we’re fortunate enough to partner with.
This year, @MollySOShea and @sourceryy captured some of those conversations, offering a glimpse into what our founders are building and why.
We’re grateful for the trust they place in us, and we feel a deep responsibility to keep earning it.
Full series out now.
Strike Capital retweeted
Left the SF echo chamber for a weekend. What we perceive as consensus is rarely assumed by the rest of the world. Really enjoyed all the conversations, thanks for a great weekend @StrikeCapital_
Once a year, we bring together the friends and founders we’re fortunate enough to partner with.
This year, @MollySOShea and @sourceryy captured some of those conversations, offering a glimpse into what our founders are building and why.
We’re grateful for the trust they place in us, and we feel a deep responsibility to keep earning it.
Full series out now.
Once a year, we bring together the friends and founders we’re fortunate enough to partner with.
This year, @MollySOShea and @sourceryy captured some of those conversations, offering a glimpse into what our founders are building and why.
We’re grateful for the trust they place in us, and we feel a deep responsibility to keep earning it.
Full series out now.
BREAKING: Sourcery Live in the South of France 🇫🇷
The most beautiful mini-series yet, out now.
Conversations across global sales, physical AI, defense, semiconductors, photonics, robotics, infrastructure & the future of European industry.
Courtesy of our friends at @StrikeCapital_
Interviews with:
Shuo Wang - Co-Founder & CRO of Deel
Sean Henry - CEO of Stord
Aistis Šimaitis- CEO & Co founder of Onodrim
Herwig Van Hove - Founder & CEO of Thema
Yannick De Koninck - CTO of Thema
Bruno Wejchert - Strike Capital
Steven Latre - VP of AI at Imec
George Hadjiminas - Chief Strategy Officer - Theon International & EFA Group
Adam Chambers - Strike Capital
Strike Capital retweeted
Sean is one of the most killer under the radar CEOs out there. Stord 🚀
Sat down to share our mission, progress, and the less known parts of Stord with @MollySOShea at the @sourceryy X @StrikeCapital_ event in the south of France.
10 years, 10-figures, and still doubling.
Great event @LouisVanHove 🫡
Strike Capital retweeted
Industrialising Europe’s decades of investments in innovation, here in the heart of Europe, is a must get right mission!
Photonics CEO Herwig Van Hove says Belgium is surprisingly dominant in photonics:
“Between 2000-2015, there were 4,000 peer-reviewed white papers on photonics globally. 35% of them came from the University of Ghent.”
“With the exception of Biscoff and chocolate, Belgium has no dominance like that in any other field.”
Strike Capital retweeted
Excited to partner with Michal Solowow on building @SGE_Nuclear .
Europe’s AI ambitions will be constrained by power. Building the next generation of data centers and compute infrastructure requires abundant, reliable and competitively priced clean energy.
That’s exactly what SGE is built to solve.
Strike Capital retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: The Sales Machine Behind $17.3B Deel
Co-Founder & CRO Shuo Wang (@shuooo)
$1M → $100M → $1B → $1.5B+ ARR
I sat down with Shuo in the South of France to break down the *sales machine* behind one of tech’s fastest-growing companies.
@deel stats:
› $1.5B+ in revenue
› $17.3B valuation (Ribbit, Coatue, a16z)
› 40,000+ customers
› 15 acquisitions
› Launched Akai, its AI agent platform
(Rumors a crazy new ai product launching soon 👀)
Deel added >$140M ARR in 90 days without increasing headcount by automating~600 Full Time Employees' equivalent in work with Akai
Shuo co-founded Deel alongside Alex Bouaziz (@Bouazizalex), Co-Founder & CEO, in 2019. They built Deel as a global company from day 1. Today, the company helps businesses hire, manage & pay teams around the world.
We also get into:
› Why Shuo thinks founders simply aren't selling enough
› Building & incentivizing a remote sales organization across 120 countries
› How an MIT-trained robotics engineer became CRO
› Shuo and Alex's founder dynamic, going global from day one
› What she's learned from James Dyson & Jeff Bezos
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Shuo Wang, Co-Founder & CRO at Deel
(00:41) How Deel went from $100M to $1B ARR in 3 years
(02:43) Why Deel went global from day one
(03:36) Who uses Deel? From ElevenLabs to Chanel
(04:16) Hot take
(05:15) Why sales is really about systems
(06:18) How to build a winning remote sales team
(07:48) Going global with Snoop Dogg
(08:34) How Shou & Alex divide roles
(09:23) The founder who inspired Shuo
(10:24) The Bezos mindset
(11:36) NEW Hot take
Strike Capital retweeted
NEW: Stord’s $3B Bet on Robotics, AI & Physical Infrastructure
From Thiel Fellow at 19 to building a $1B+ revenue business
Founder & CEO Sean Henry (@seanhenry)
@GetSTORD stats:
› 100M packages/year
› ~$20B in GMV
› $1B+ revenue this year, after 10Xing in 4 years
› 8B operational data points
The goal is to level the playing field with Amazon Prime for the other 2/3 of commerce on the internet.
I sat down with Sean in Cap Ferrat to talk about the company's $250M Series F, its massive bet on robotics & AI, plus why he believes the biggest value from this technology may ultimately accrue to physical businesses, not the AI and robotics companies themselves.
We get into:
› The data advantage behind 100M packages a year
› Why humanoids may be the wrong form factor for warehouses
› How acquisitions & 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.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Sean Henry, Founder & CEO at Stord
(00:41) What Stord is building in logistics
(02:42) Why robotics is finally ready for the real world
(04:37) How Stord is teaching robots to work
(06:09) Do humanoid robots actually make sense?
(07:20) Why owning the whole supply chain matters
(10:01) The problem that started Stord
(11:53) The Thiel Fellowship lesson: Build a monopoly
(13:10) Hot take: Why AI and robotics will become commodities
The best part of our job, the people. Our founders, partners, and closest friends, all together in one place. Thank you @MollySOShea and @sourceryy for being a special part of it.
DFM is often treated as a downstream review step, after much of the geometry is already set. Bringing real catalog parts into the model’s design loop enables Smith to make designs manufacturable by construction. That's the edge.
Strike Capital retweeted
Astra out of the box is really good at making dysfunctional toy models. Astra with proper agent orchestration gets you closer to true high fidelity engineering output. Here’s our take on a turbofan.
Strike Capital retweeted
Does scaling pre-training on general web video improve a complex manipulation task in real deployment?
We scale model size and pre-training compute, and test on one industrial task.
Yes. The better a pre-trained model predicts web video, the better its post-trained policy. 🧵
ALT Seven pre-trained video-model checkpoints on one chart. Task performance on a real robot (at-speed completion rate: every requirement met within 100 s, 0 to 100%) rises with pre-training quality (DINO FD on held-out web video, log scale, axis reversed so better is to the right). XS, S, M, L are model sizes. The four M points are one model at 0.08×, 0.18×, 0.37× and 1× of its pre-training compute.
