Teardown

Daily digest · 2026-07-24

Scan #013: The retreat trade

Eight companies defined by what they've decided to stop doing — Harper, EnerVenue, FYLD, Veho, UPS, Kinaxis, Best Buy, and Instacart.

The thread running through today’s eight is retreat — chosen, forced, or disguised. UPS is firing its biggest customer and shrinking its network on purpose; EnerVenue walked away from a fully-incentivized gigafactory; Best Buy is managing decline while calling it transformation; Instacart is buying growth to hide share loss. On the other side, four emerging companies are running the mechanisms that make those retreats rational — and one incumbent, Kinaxis, just proved that refusing to retreat can be the right call. The pairing to watch: UPS ceding exactly the ground Veho is built to take.

Harper — Insurance · Emerging. A YC W25 AI-native commercial brokerage ($46.8M seed+A from Emergence, Feb 2026) that went from $40K to ~$5M ARR and 5,000+ small-business customers in 13 months. What the press release skips: at roughly $1,000 of revenue per account, Harper is placing largely through wholesalers whose fees stack on its commission, and it has essentially no independent review footprint — the whole model now hinges on renewal retention, the one number it hasn’t published.

EnerVenue — Energy · Emerging. The Stanford-born nickel-hydrogen storage company that raised a $300M Series B extension (April 2026) after quietly abandoning its celebrated Kentucky gigafactory in November 2024 — the site went to Canadian Solar — cycling out its founding CEO, and restarting manufacturing in Changzhou, China. Four cell generations, two CEOs and two continents in six years, against an LFP price collapse that keeps moving the goalposts its 30,000-cycle thesis has to clear.

FYLD — Construction · Emerging. The SGN/BCG/Ontario Teachers’ spinout that turns crews’ jobsite videos into AI risk assessments; $41M Series B led by Energy Impact Partners (Feb 2026), 82% growth, Kiewit and Quanta landed in the US. The number nobody quotes: its field app sits at 2.8 stars on Google Play — the workers who generate the training data hate the tool — and its own Series B lead also backs Urbint, which predicts hazards without asking crews to film anything.

Veho — Logistics · Emerging. Itamar Zur’s gig-driver parcel carrier ($300M raised, $1.5B valuation in Feb 2022, untested since) now covering 68 markets and ~46% of the US population, selling next-day delivery brands say prices 30-40% below UPS and FedEx ground. It’s the direct beneficiary of the diversification wave UPS’s shrinkage created — but Trustpilot stolen-package patterns, driver deadhead complaints, and a promised-then-quiet 2025 profitability target say the cost line hasn’t been proven at the price it charges.

UPS — Logistics · Incumbent, at risk. The 1907 parcel giant is executing the most deliberate shrinkage in its history: >50% of Amazon volume gone by mid-2026, ~50 buildings closed, 30,000 positions cut, $3B of costs out, Q2 earnings July 28. The execution is competent; the problem is what fills the vacuum — Amazon Logistics is now America’s largest parcel carrier by volume, and the regionals UPS dismisses as cherry-pickers (OnTrac, Veho) are 30% cheaper on exactly the e-commerce ground volume it’s walking away from. Margin recovery has to outrun structural share loss, and the dividend is frozen while it tries.

Kinaxis — Supply chain · Incumbent, well positioned. The Ottawa concurrent-planning veteran (founded 1984, IPO’d 2014) that activist Daventry told to sell itself in September 2024. It didn’t — and ARR growth reaccelerated from 12% to 20% between Q4 2024 and Q1 2026 while margins doubled and ex-LLamasoft chief Razat Gaurav took over in January 2026. The in-memory planning engine the activists treated as legacy is precisely the substrate AI agents need to act on; the moat question is whether Maestro Agents land before o9 and SAP bundle the same capability into data they already own.

Best Buy — Retail · Incumbent, at risk. Richard Schulze’s 1966 stereo shop grew into the last national electronics chain — and three flat years at ~$41.5B revenue, a $475M health-business write-off, and an electronics-share crown ceded to Amazon say the Renew Blue playbook has run out of road. The 2025 marketplace and retail-media relaunches copy Amazon and Walmart a decade late, tariffs hit its import-heavy assortment directly, and the AI-device replacement supercycle it’s waiting on keeps not arriving.

Instacart — Ecommerce · Incumbent, at risk. Apoorva Mehta’s grocery marketplace survived the $39B-to-$10B valuation round trip and IPO’d profitable on ads. But the growth is increasingly bought — $10 minimums, waived fees, flat basket sizes — while DoorDash has passed it in third-party grocery-and-retail order volume and retailers multi-home across every platform. New CEO Chris Rogers inherits a stock sitting where it IPO’d three years ago and an AI-agent shopping wave that threatens the storefront layer it monetizes.

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