BackOps won two enterprise deals against a well-known AI company after Sean McCarthy gave it a 5% chance.
BackOps raised a $6m seed, twice the median, with six or seven term sheets, choosing Construct.
BackOps stopped selling around August 2025 to rebuild as an enterprise-grade platform with an AI process center and SOP recorder.
BackOps beat a better-known AI rival to two enterprise deals
BackOps is an AI-native operating system for the back office of last-mile warehousing, and it won two large enterprise deals against a far better-known AI company. The wedge is package exceptions. Between 5 and 8 percent of shipments go wrong, and the claims and temperature breaches land on 3PL staff doing repetitive work with short tenure. Enterprise buyers then pulled the company past operations into finance and procurement.
Takeaways
Enterprise scale forced a platform rebuild. BackOps stopped selling in August 2025 and rebuilt as an enterprise-grade platform with an AI process center and an SOP recorder. Customers kept delaying written SOPs, so an eight-minute screen recording now hands over a workflow.
Package exceptions are an underserved market. Roughly 5 to 8 percent of packages hit a problem, and carriers like UPS and FedEx sit outside the 3PL's control. One grocery temperature breach can generate millions in claims a month.
The idea came from warehouse admin churn. At Amazon Shipping McCarthy spent four days a week in customer warehouses and asked about 85 owners what hurt most. Nearly all said admin churn, with admin hires lasting about six months.
Cold email and speed won the seed. He emailed VCs directly. 10VC wrote the first check and Gradient led the pre-seed. The $6m seed drew six or seven term sheets, and he chose Construct for its supply chain focus.
AI enterprise selling differs from SaaS. Srugo notes Slack and Notion never needed to share data, while AI requires sync across departments. McCarthy expects point solutions to be commoditized and says the moat is going deep without API access.
Honesty and data beat gut feel. His closing advice to founders is to be honest with themselves and operate off data rather than gut checks.
How the two enterprise deals were won
McCarthy gave BackOps a five percent chance against a well-known AI enterprise and told his board not to get excited.
Nothing came back for about two months, so he treated both deals as dead on arrival.
An email asking for SOC 2 and security documents reopened the conversation, and BackOps went above and beyond on the documentation.
It won the deals and changed the trajectory. Entry points run $200,000 to $300,000 plus usage, with seven figures expected next year.
The enterprise outbound playbook
Target the SVP of operations about 90 percent of the time, using back channels and tailored case studies.
Write the introduction message for the connector rather than asking for a generic intro, and cross-thread LinkedIn and email.
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On this episode 2
Show 1
The efficiency pitch almost never works. A pointed use case lands about eight times out of ten.
Of ten reach-outs, about four respond and one becomes a meeting. BackOps moves on after seven or eight touches.
First meetings run thirty to forty-five minutes with a demo. Pilots last 30 days, 60 at most, inside a one-year auto-converting contract, and often leave AI startups in purgatory.