We scaled 400+ retail locations.
We know what goes unnoticed.
Shrinkage we couldn’t attribute. Promos we couldn’t score. Stores that underperformed silently for months. Ward was born from running LeanBox, and from every problem we found too late.
We lived the problem before we built the solution.
LeanBox was a micromarket retailer — unmanned retail locations inside offices, hospitals, and universities. We scaled it past 400 locations and 8 figures in annual revenue.
At that scale, everything breaks quietly. A location starts underperforming, spoilage creeps up at a handful of sites, a product mix drifts off and nobody catches it for weeks. We had the data — but by the time someone pulled a report and spotted the problem, the damage was already done.
We built internal tools to try to stay ahead of it. Dashboards, alerts, spreadsheets stitched to APIs. It worked — barely. But we always thought there had to be a better way to give operators real-time visibility without building a data team from scratch.
We custom-built the entire stack. Every piece of it.
There was no off-the-shelf solution for unmanned micromarket retail at our scale. So we built it all ourselves — a custom ERP, a full inventory management system, self-service POS kiosks, a web ordering platform, and a mobile app for preference tracking and purchasing.
Five systems, all generating data, all needing to talk to each other. We built the data pipelines, ETL jobs, anomaly detection, and automated alerting to tie it all together. It took a dedicated engineering effort that most retail operators simply cannot afford. Ward packages everything we learned into a platform that works out of the box.
No PhDs. No whitepapers. Just P&Ls we had to defend.
We don't come from an AI research lab. Nobody here is publishing papers on transformer architecture or competing on ML benchmarks. We come from the floor. Managing routes, renegotiating supplier contracts, figuring out why location #247 dropped 30% in two weeks.
This is not a frontier AI research play. The breakthroughs already happened. In labs, by people much smarter than us. What hasn't happened is someone taking those breakthroughs and making them actually work inside a 200-store operation where the ERP was installed in 2014 and the POS still exports CSV.
That’s the hard part. Not the models. The mess. We built Ward because we spent years knee-deep in that mess at LeanBox, stitching dashboards and writing ETL jobs at 2am. Our AI chops come from implementation, not theory. And in retail, that’s the only kind that matters.
AI recommends. You decide.
Ward surfaces what matters. Humans make the call. Lane assist, not autopilot. We’re not building AGI. We’re building the thing that tells you Store #41 has a spoilage problem before it shows up in your month-end close.
The same team behind LeanBox and askotter.ai.
Retail operators who became data engineers who became platform builders. Ward is the latest product from a team that has been shipping together for years.
Scaled LeanBox from concept to 400+ locations and 8-figure revenue. Custom-built the ERP, POS, and data stack that became the blueprint for Ward. 15+ years in growth marketing and software engineering.
Ex-YC and Meta. Helped build and scale LeanBox's product suite. Product strategy, frontend engineering, and platform design. Turns operator pain points into interfaces that actually get used.
Ex-YC and Amazon. Backend systems, data infrastructure, and cloud architecture. Designed the pipelines that process millions of retail transactions at scale.
Investor and operator with multiple exits across consumer and technology. Advises on business development and market strategy.
Retail is the hardest observability problem nobody is solving.
Engineers have had Datadog, PagerDuty, and Grafana for years. When a server goes down, someone gets paged in minutes. But when a retail location's revenue drops 20%, it sits in a spreadsheet for weeks.
We are bringing engineering-grade monitoring to retail operations — stockout prediction, shrinkage detection, demand forecasting, price optimization — all running continuously across every location, every SKU, every day.
POS & Transaction Data
Every sale, refund, and basket across every location — unified and watched in real time.
Inventory & Supply Chain
Stock levels, spoilage, fill rates, and reorder signals — anomalies caught before they hit the shelf.
Finance & Margin
Per-location P&L, COGS drift, margin erosion — flagged automatically, not found in month-end close.
Labor & Operations
Scheduling, route efficiency, service levels — operational signals that impact the bottom line.
We built Ward because we kept finding problems too late.
The shrinkage we couldn’t attribute. The promos we couldn’t score. See what Ward finds in your data.
Find out what your data has been hiding.
Tell us about your operation. We’ll show you the problems Ward catches — and the ones your current tools miss.