He cleaned campus bathrooms to afford textbooks. Two decades later his software quietly steers more than $10 billion through Amazon and Walmart.
Walk into Teikametrics and you will find an AI engine doing something deceptively dull: deciding, thousands of times a second, what a product should cost and what an ad is worth. Behind it sits a founder who has actually stood on the other side of that screen - placing the bets, eating the losses, sweating the margin. Alasdair McLean-Foreman did not study the marketplace from a distance. He sold into it before most people had heard the phrase "third-party seller."
Teikametrics - "teika," ていか, Japanese for market price - began life as repricing software in a Harvard dorm room. Today it is a Boston company of roughly 300 people, optimizing advertising and pricing for brands and sellers across Amazon and Walmart. In 2021 it raised a $40 million Series B led by Intel Capital, with GoDaddy, Centana Growth Partners, SoftBank's Lydia Jett, Jump Capital and Granite Point Capital all writing checks. The pitch was simple: every seller deserves the kind of decision-making that used to belong only to giants.
The conviction underneath it is older than the company. McLean-Foreman likes to quote Jeff Bezos - "your margin is my opportunity" - and then spends his days handing sellers the tools to fight back against exactly that pressure. He has been the small operator squeezed by a platform. He builds for the version of himself who needed the help and could not buy it.
There is a tidy irony here. The company that lives and dies by the algorithm was founded by someone who spent his twenties measuring himself in tenths of a second around a 400-meter oval. The discipline transferred. The patience did too.
Consider the scale of what runs through the platform now. Teikametrics describes its software as optimizing advertising and pricing across more than $10 billion in marketplace transaction volume. Its customers are the brands and sellers who live on Amazon and Walmart, where a few cents of bid adjustment or a poorly timed price change can decide whether a business clears its inventory or sits on it. The product the company built, branded Flywheel, is meant to make those calls automatically and continuously - the kind of always-on optimization that, until recently, only the biggest retailers could afford to staff.
The momentum that convinced Intel Capital was specific, not vague. In the year before the 2021 raise, Teikametrics grew its business on Walmart's marketplace by more than 900% - a number that tracked the broader pandemic-era surge in online selling and the scramble among brands to professionalize their marketplace presence. The company has layered managed services and preferred financing on top of the core software, betting that sellers want not just data but the help to act on it.
He grew up in Southwest London, living above a retail store - retail was literally over his head before it became his career. He was fast, fast enough to run the 800 meters for Great Britain, and that speed carried him across the Atlantic to Harvard on a path most people would call a clean break. It was not clean.
Arriving in Cambridge, he needed thousands of dollars he did not have for books and supplies. So his first American job was cleaning bathrooms on campus. The story he tells next has the shape of a legend but the receipts of a real one: he started selling online - the lore says it began with a single broken watch - and the side hustle compounded. By 2001 it was a dorm-room e-commerce business in high-end sporting goods. By 2003 it was one of Amazon's first third-party retailers in its category, back when being early was a leap of faith rather than a land grab.
He even took a year off school to run both his training and his business at full tilt, chasing a place at the trials for the 2004 Athens Olympics. The economics degree was real. So was the willingness to bet the calendar on himself.
What came between the dorm-room store and Teikametrics is the part founders usually skip. After his sporting-goods venture, he built Traineo, an online weight-loss and fitness platform - the idea being an interconnected training experience, a place to follow a program rather than just buy a product. It worked well enough to attract a buyer: he exited to News Corporation, and the technology was white-labeled for The Times of London. Along the way he built e-commerce systems used by large organizations and brands, the unglamorous plumbing of digital retail. By the time he sat down to start Teikametrics, he had already shipped the kind of Web 2.0 commerce software most of his future customers were still trying to buy.
It's very tough competing against full-time athletes, but I enjoy being an underdog.
You've got a finite amount of time, so why not just go for it.
Founds an e-commerce business (HDO Sport) selling high-end sporting goods out of his Harvard dorm while running for the track team.
Becomes one of Amazon's earliest third-party retailers in sporting goods. That same autumn he takes silver at the Ivy Heptagonals and earns First-Team All-Ivy honors.
Builds Traineo, an online weight-loss and fitness platform. Exits to News Corporation; the technology is white-labeled for The Times of London.
Turns repricing software into a company. The mission: bring sophisticated, AI-driven decisions to every online seller.
Raises $40M to expand the Flywheel platform, after growing its Walmart marketplace business more than 900% in a single year.
He raced full-time athletes as a student-entrepreneur and liked the disadvantage. The marketplace he now serves is full of small sellers in the same spot.
"I was able to take a lot of risks when I was starting out as a seller myself. The path wasn't linear but I don't have any regrets - it helped define who we are."
Every product decision points back to the operator squeezed by platform fees - the founder remembers being exactly that person.
The discipline of distance running - mileage now, payoff later - shows up in how he talks about compounding a company over years, not quarters.
Flywheel exists to give every seller the pricing and advertising intelligence that used to be reserved for the largest brands.
The stated ambition: reach every online seller in the world - and take Teikametrics public.
Cross-country has been a bit of a surprise as I'm not doing nearly as much mileage as the top college guys.
The path wasn't linear but I don't have any regrets - it helped define who we are as a company dedicated to helping other sellers.
It's very tough competing against full-time athletes, but I enjoy being an underdog.
You've got a finite amount of time, so why not just go for it.
Spend time with how McLean-Foreman frames the business and a pattern emerges. The marketplaces - Amazon first, Walmart fast behind it - turned retail into a real-time auction. Price, advertising bids, inventory, and search ranking all move together, all the time. A human can watch one product. A seller with a thousand SKUs cannot. That gap is the whole opportunity.
His answer is to treat the seller's account the way a fund treats a portfolio: constant, data-driven reallocation toward whatever is working. The company's own framing is a flywheel - advertising drives sales, sales improve organic rank, better rank lowers the cost of the next sale - and the software's job is to keep that wheel spinning without a person babysitting it. It is the kind of edge he wishes he'd had when he was the one placing the bets in 2003.
The headquarters sits at 280 Summer Street in Boston, a short walk from the harbor that once made the city a trading port. The metaphor writes itself, so he mostly lets the numbers do the talking instead: billions in volume, a 900% year on Walmart, a roster of investors who do not usually chase hype. The aspiration he states plainly is to reach every online seller in the world and, eventually, to take the company public.
Sources: Teikametrics, Crunchbase, Bloomberg, The Harvard Crimson, BusinessWire, Authority Magazine, Alejandro Cremades. Figures reflect public reporting and may have changed.