The founder who keeps rebuilding the room where business happens
Ed Stevens runs Scoot from Dallas with a simple argument that has taken him years to sharpen: the tools people use to sell were never designed for selling. Video platforms were built for internal calls, he says, and sales got bolted on afterward. Scoot is his attempt to fix that - a live environment where buyers, sellers, and AI agents meet in real time, purpose-built for the work of closing rather than the work of catching up.
That framing is recent, but the instinct behind it is not. Stevens has founded five companies over a career that stretches back more than two decades, and nearly all of them circle the same question: how do people connect and get things done when they are not in the same room. Scoot, the company he leads today, is the latest answer. It started life as Preciate, a platform organized around giving and receiving appreciation, then evolved into a dynamic virtual meeting product, and now presents itself as an AI sales environment with live AI agents in every meeting.
The 2026 version of Scoot combines three parts, according to the company: a real-time coaching layer it calls Live Advisor, a meeting and webinar product called Scoot Engage, and an intelligence engine it refers to as The Brain. In April 2026, Scoot announced a partnership with LIFT Consulting to bring that coaching directly into sales conversations. The pitch is that the guidance arrives during the meeting, while a rep can still act on it, rather than in a report afterward.
From an Ohio furniture floor to a Russian factory
Stevens learned to sell early, working the floor of his family's furniture store in Ohio. The path from there was anything but linear. He attended the United States Naval Academy and served aboard a submarine, then took a Bachelor of Arts in Russian Literature from Stanford University - an unusual credential for a technology founder, and one that shaped what came next.
After college he moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, where, by his own account, he became the first American on the payroll of a Russian military factory in the years after the Cold War. He went on to help Russian companies market consumer products internationally. It was through that work, at a company called Norvel that manufactured and distributed model-engine airplanes, that he first bumped into the problem that would define his career. In 1998 Norvel became one of the first brands in the hobby industry to launch an online store, and Stevens saw firsthand the friction between online sales and the brick-and-mortar retailers who had always sold the product.
Shopatron and the unheated warehouse
That friction became Shopatron. Stevens started the company in 2000 and launched it in 2001 with a model that was ahead of its moment: let manufacturers sell directly online, then route each order to a local retailer to fulfill. It was omnichannel retail before the word was common, and his patented approach to order management eventually reached more than a thousand brands.
The early days were not glamorous. Shopatron's first offices sat in a warehouse with plastic-sheet walls and no heat, where winter temperatures hovered around 45 to 50 degrees. Stevens has described pausing sales calls during production shoots - a resourceful, cramped period that he credits with teaching him how to build. He also lived through a genuine near-death moment for the business: on Cyber Monday in December 2009, a system outage knocked Shopatron offline for 14 hours on one of the busiest sales days of the year. The team recovered, and the next day they called every customer to apologize and gather feedback. Stevens has said the company spent the following two years turning that failure into a stronger organization.
In 2013 he distilled the experience into a book, Allied to Win: How I Launched and Led a Leading eCommerce Company. Two years later, in 2015, Shopatron was acquired by Vista Equity Partners and folded into Kibo Commerce, where Stevens served as chief operating officer.
Preciate, then Scoot
His next act began as Preciate, built around the idea that authentic relationships could be strengthened through technology and structured appreciation. As remote work reshaped how teams gathered, the product shifted toward replicating what happens when a group of people assembles in person to network and talk - the many-to-many energy that flat video grids tend to flatten out.
In February 2023 the company rebranded to Scoot and closed a $12 million Series A led by Woodland Capital, a notable raise given how cold the venture market was at the time. Stevens framed the round as proof of demand rather than a vanity milestone. From there, the product kept moving toward its current identity as an environment designed specifically for revenue teams and the AI agents now working alongside them.
Across furniture, retail software, appreciation, and AI sales, the through-line is consistent. Stevens keeps returning to the same craft - connecting people who are far apart and making that connection productive - and keeps rebuilding the room where it happens as the technology underneath it changes.