Teardown

Daily digest · 2026-07-25

Scan #014: When execution isn't the problem

Eight companies whose plans are working while the ground moves — Quaise, Monumental, ShipBob, Novella, Coupa, RXO, Petco, and Ryan Specialty.

The thread running through today’s eight is that execution and outcome have come apart. RXO did nearly everything it promised and earned six million dollars in a quarter; Petco’s turnaround is real and the stock is $2.60; Ryan Specialty built the best wholesale platform in insurance just as E&S property rates rolled over; Novella picked the same softening pool as its wedge. On the emerging side, Quaise and Monumental are testing whether deep-tech economics survive contact with rock and brick, and ShipBob has spent two years waiting for a market that will price it as software. The deliberate pairing: Ryan Specialty, the wholesale incumbent, and Novella, the AI-native brokerage benchmarking itself against Ryan’s own compensation ratio.

Quaise Energy — Energy · Emerging. The MIT spinout that drills with no drill bit — a surface gyrotron vaporizes basement rock via millimeter waves — closed a $134M Series B first tranche (July 7, 2026; $230M total) to build Project Obsidian in Oregon. What the press release skips: the 2022 roadmap promised first steam by 2026 and a repowered 100 MW plant by 2028; mid-2026 reality is no steam, a 50 MW first phase, and 2030 first power — and Obsidian sits at Newberry Volcano, one of America’s shallowest superhot sites, so the flagship deliberately avoids testing the drill-anywhere thesis that justifies the valuation. The near-term falsifiable test: the 1 km Texas well promised by end-2026.

Monumental — Construction · Emerging. The Amsterdam bricklaying-robot company from the Silk-to-Palantir founders raised a $32M Khosla-led round (July 15, 2026; ~$57M total) to enter Texas, Florida, Virginia and Arizona. Its double inversion of failed predecessors like FBR: robots that lay at one human mason’s pace, charged at human-parity per-brick rates, with the economics riding on cheap hardware made accurate by software. The ramp from 8 homes in Q1 2026 to ~50 in Q2 is the first evidence of compounding; the open question is whether a robot-laid brick’s fully loaded cost ever falls decisively below a crew’s, or venture money is subsidizing walls sold at human prices and paid for at robot costs.

ShipBob — Ecommerce / Logistics · Emerging. The Chicago YC alum sells Amazon-grade 2-day fulfillment to SMB brands through 60+ mostly partner-operated warehouses standardized on its WMS — ~$500M revenue in 2023 (Sacra), ~100M orders a year by mid-2025, $330M raised at a $1.1B 2021 mark. The parts the pitch omits: the 2023 growth spike leaned heavily on a single TikTok Shop fulfillment deal, SMB churn runs on ~1-year cycles, and the IPO banks hired in February 2024 — at a $4B, 8x-revenue ask for a 20-40% gross-margin business — have now waited past two full years while rival Stord raised ~$1B. The tell will be whether it eventually prices at a software multiple or an honest logistics one.

Novella — Insurance · Emerging. An AI-native wholesale E&S brokerage founded in 2024 by a Lemonade product alum, with a $16M Brewer Lane-led Series A (May 2026; $21M total, carrier Arch on the cap table), ~100 carrier appointments and 3,500+ retail agencies feeding it placements. Founder Max Kane publicly benchmarks the company against Ryan Specialty’s 57% compensation ratio — but revenue was a seven-figure run rate in early 2026 against a $10B-premium ambition, and the category’s one completed experiment, Flow Specialty, shed its producers and sold its assets to ReSource Pro in June 2026. The open question: can AI-lifted premium-per-head outgrow an E&S property market deflating 12.5-20% — the very commission pool Novella’s revenue is a slice of?

Coupa — Supply chain · Incumbent, well positioned. The business-spend-management suite founded 2006 by ex-Oracle engineers, taken private by Thoma Bravo for $8.0B at $81/share in February 2023 over an activist’s demand for “north of $110,” now runs $1.5T+ of annual spend on ~$1.2B estimated 2025 revenue with a $2.6B private-credit stack priced near SOFR+750. The tell from May 2026: buying Tonkean (intake orchestration) and Rossum (document AI) is an admission that Zip — $2.2B valuation — found a real seam in the intake layer, and Coupa chose to buy the counter-architecture rather than argue the layer away. Well positioned, narrowly: the 19-year pooled spend-data moat and a coherent agentic pivot outweigh the insurgency, but the leverage leaves no room for slips.

RXO — Logistics · Incumbent, at risk. The asset-light brokerage Brad Jacobs spun out of XPO in November 2022, made America’s #3 broker by buying Coyote from UPS for $1.025B in 2024 — at a 43% discount to what UPS paid in 2015, funded entirely with fresh equity. Here is the uncomfortable read: RXO executed nearly everything it promised — integration ahead of schedule, synergies nearly tripled past $70M — and still earned $6M of adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2026 on an 11.4% brokerage margin, while C.H. Robinson stayed comfortably profitable and TQL grew to $7.36B through the same trough. That is a disclosure about the business model, not the management. The ~50% stock rally into repricing contract rates is a trade; brokerage spreads competed on both sides, with no switching costs and AI compressing take rates, are not a moat.

Petco — Retail · Incumbent, at risk. The ~1,400-store pet retailer ($6.0B FY2025 sales, ~300 in-store vet hospitals, $24.99/month Vital Care) is a five-times-flipped PE asset: two Leonard Green/TPG take-privates, the ~$4.6B CVC/CPP LBO in 2016, a $18 re-IPO in 2021, ~$2.60 today. Joel Anderson’s turnaround is genuinely working — EBITDA +21.3% to $408M, first net profit since FY2022, first positive comp in Q1 FY2026 — but the ownership math runs the show: CVC and CPP still hold 65.85% a decade into an underwater hold, February 2026’s refinancing tightened covenants, and the differentiating vet build-out is paused until 2027 exactly as Chewy starts opening clinics. Fixing itself faster than it is defending itself.

Ryan Specialty — Insurance · Incumbent, well positioned. The No. 2 U.S. wholesale specialty distributor, founded in 2010 by Aon founder Pat Ryan at age 73, did $3.05B FY2025 revenue on ~$32B of premium placed after a debt-funded buying spree (US Assure $1.08B, Velocity $549M, Innovisk $427M). Two corrections to the ambient narrative: the rumored October 2025 death of the now-88-year-old Ryan is false — he was buying $3.9M of stock in June 2026 — and the real problem is the cycle: 25-35% E&S property rate cuts on large accounts, a guidance cut to 4-6% organic for 2026, a 12.8% one-day stock drop, four securities-fraud investigations, and ~3.3x leverage taken on at the top. The moat is structural anyway — top-two panel scale, the largest delegated-authority platform, 96% producer retention, and a surplus-lines market that has tripled in a decade and doesn’t give risk back.

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