We scaled 400+ retail locations.
We know what goes unnoticed.
Ward came out of running LeanBox. It came out of every problem we found too late.
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We lived the problem before we built the solution.
LeanBox was a micromarket retailer: unmanned locations inside offices, hospitals, and universities. We scaled it past 400 locations and 8 figures.
A location slips. Spoilage creeps up. Nobody catches it for weeks.
We had the data. By the time anyone spotted it, the damage was done.
Dashboards, alerts, spreadsheets wired to APIs. It worked, barely.
Real-time visibility for operators, without building a data team from scratch.
Ward came out of every problem we found too late.
We custom-built the entire stack. Every piece of it.
No off-the-shelf tool fit unmanned micromarket retail at our scale. So we built it all.
The system of record that ran inventory and replenishment.
Kiosk checkout capturing every transaction at unmanned locations.
Inventory and ordering unified on the same data.
Five systems wired together into one source of truth.
Catching drift and alerting before it hit the shelf.
It took an engineering team most operators cannot afford. Ward is that team’s work, packaged.
AI recommends. You decide.
Agents catch the problem and propose the fix. A named person decides whether it runs. Lane assist, not autopilot.
Ward drafts the change. Someone on your side approves it by name before it reaches SAP, Relex, or Oracle.
Model-agnostic, on your API keys, your data inside your boundary. Read-only until you turn a write on.
Every answer cites the SQL it ran. Detection, cause, playbook, write-back, and approver stream to your SIEM.
The breakthroughs already happened in the labs. The hard part is making them run in a 200-store operation where the ERP dates to 2014 and the POS still exports CSV.
Serial founders. 30+ years building and running retail systems.
The same team behind LeanBox and askotter.ai. Operators who became data engineers who became platform builders.
Scaled LeanBox from concept to 400+ locations and 8 figures. Built the ERP, POS, and data stack that became the blueprint for Ward.
Ex-YC and Meta. Built and scaled LeanBox’s product suite. Turns operator pain points into interfaces that get used.
Ex-YC and Amazon. Designed the pipelines that process millions of retail transactions at scale.
Advisors who have done this before.
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. Retail got dashboards.
Stockout prediction, shrink detection, demand forecasting, price optimization. Every location, every SKU, every day.
POS, Transactions & Inventory
Every sale, refund, and basket on one view with stock levels, spoilage, and fill rates. Anomalies caught before they hit the shelf.
Finance, Margin & Operations
Per-store P&L, COGS drift, and margin erosion flagged as they happen, not at month-end close.
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.
Read-only to start · your LLM keys · SOC 2 Type II underway · or book a call directly
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.