Retool alumni's Pallet raised $18M to be the AI operating system for moving things

An all-in-one transportation and warehouse management system that uses AI to streamline logistics operations from order entry to payment.

$18M Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures with Bessemer Venture Partners and Activant Capital, plus angels including Toast founders Aman Narang and Steve Fredette; Bain also led the earlier $3M seed.

Retool engineers Sushanth Raman and Andrew Spencer both had family in logistics — Raman's grandfather in shipping, Spencer's father running engineering at MercuryGate — but it was meetings with Bay Area logistics businesses that showed Raman how much work was still manual, sometimes half of a company's staff on back-office tasks.

Pallet positions itself as 'a modern OS for moving any physical product from point A to B', using AI so users need not enter orders or answer quote requests manually. CEO Sushanth Raman's stated endgame is 'contactless orders' delivered without a human in the loop, via AI agents automating many or all steps of the flow.

It targets the dullest, most expensive layer of a trillion-dollar industry — back-office paperwork — rather than the glamorous routing or fleet tech.

Carrier scorecards turned responsiveness into revenue, giving logistics operators a self-interested reason to adopt automation now.

Full-stack coverage from shipment receipt to payment is the moat: single-point tools leave customers stitching systems together, which is the problem Pallet sells against.

In industries that run on scorecards, software stops being overhead: when responsiveness is measured and wins revenue, automation sells itself to operators who ignored it for decades.

As of the October 2, 2024 announcement, Pallet was scaling from its trucking and bulky-goods wedge with fresh Series A capital and a stated roadmap toward AI-agent-driven contactless orders. The material records no later results.