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America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts Every consumer brand shares a quiet, expensive problem: they make more product than they sell. This is built into the model - brands forecast optimistically to hedge against stockouts, and end up sitting on trillions of dollars of perfectly good inventory. Even the most in-demand brand inevitably ends up with a color or SKU it can’t fully move. What happens to that inventory is one of the least glamorous stories in consumer goods. It gets stranded in warehouses, quietly written off, or dumped into off-price and liquidation channels. Aside from the hit to profit, this erodes the very brand equity these companies spend years and fortunes building. And, it forfeits opportunities to reach new customers, on channels that could actually drive net new sales and loyalty. For decades, the only options were bad ones. Sell product through discounters and jobbers and watch it resurface somewhere that cheapens the brand, or destroy it outright. Many of the best brands chose destruction rather than see their inventory end up in a discount bin. No one had built a brand-safe way to move excess inventory - one that treats it as an asset to recover value from, rather than a problem to bury. There’s a reason for this. Excess inventory is the opposite of a clean commodity: it’s messy, heterogeneous, one-off lots with no comps, no standard pricing, and a different right buyer for every batch. Pricing and matching that supply at scale was a problem you could only throw humans at. This is why the category defaulted to relationship-driven liquidators and race-to-the-bottom auctions. That’s exactly the kind of unstructured problem AI is now good at. We believe the winner in this market will be the platform that is AI-native and brand-safe from day one. Highstock is building exactly that, and today we are thrilled to announce that a16z is leading Highstock’s $30 million Series A. Olivia will be joining the Board, and a16z marketplace legend Jeff Jordan is also participating as an advisor. Highstock is an AI-powered B2B marketplace that connects brands sitting on excess inventory with a vetted network of global wholesale buyers. Brands move overstock discreetly, without the fire-sale optics, while Highstock handles the hard parts: matching, logistics, compliance, payments, and even managing order paperwork. Its models do the heavy lifting so both sides can browse and transact with confidence. Highstock is hard to replicate because of its team. CEO Camille van Horne and CTO Sean Cashin both came from Instacart, where Camille spent six years as a Director of Product Management leading the end-to-end fulfillment experience. Running fulfillment at Instacart, especially during COVID, was marketplace operations at its most unforgiving - matching supply to demand under messy, real-world constraints, at scale, where every failure is visible to the customer. Camille and Sean bring this level of precision and excellence to Highstock. In a little over a year, that approach has produced real scale. Highstock now has more than $1 billion in inventory listed on the platform and works with over 100 major brands. Roughly 60% of transaction volume comes from brands and conglomerates that do more than $500 million in annual revenue. On the other side of the marketplace, more than 100 business buyers reach that supply through channels most brands could never access on their own, from live sellers to international e-commerce players. Along the way, Highstock has kept more than 10 million pounds of product out of landfills. Beauty and personal care is the beachhead, but the opportunity is much larger. The same excess-inventory problem exists in apparel (which Highstock is launching now) and across consumer goods. As Highstock expands category by category, the data and the relationships compound with it. We could not be more excited to partner with Camille, Sean, and the entire Highstock team as they give excess inventory a second life. If you are a brand sitting on excess inventory, or a buyer looking for supply, check out Highstock at highstock.com - and if you want to help build it, they’re hiring. This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Furthermore, this content is not investment advice, nor is it intended for use by any investors or prospective investors in any a16z funds. This newsletter may link to other websites or contain other information obtained from third-party sources - a16z has not independently verified nor makes any representations about the current or enduring accuracy of such information. If this content includes third-party advertisements, a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content or related companies contained therein. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z; visit https://a16z.com/investment-list/ for a full list of investments. Other important information can be found at a16z.com/disclosures. You’re receiving this newsletter since you opted in earlier; if you would like to opt out of future newsletters you may unsubscribe immediately.
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