Jared Yaman

The operator turning a decade of retail into a pricing engine

Jared Yaman runs Spresso, a New York company most shoppers have never heard of but many have already paid. Its software sits behind the scenes at retail, consumer-goods, and ecommerce businesses, deciding - within limits its clients set - what a product should cost at any given moment. Yaman calls the core of it a "Pricing Agent," and he is careful about the verb he uses to describe it. Spresso, he says, does not test prices. It manages them.

The distinction matters to him. A conventional approach might A/B test a $100 handbag against a $110 version and eventually crown a winner. Spresso instead treats price as a range. It gathers signals at several points - say $85 to $115 - and dynamically routes customer traffic toward the point that maximizes profit, adjusting as demand, competition, and inventory shift. The raw material is first-party, SKU-level data: the kind of granular, product-by-product record that most retailers sit on and few know how to use.

That framing - price as a living range rather than a fixed number to be discovered - is the part Yaman is most animated about in interviews. Traditional testing throws away most of what it learns the moment it picks a winner. Spresso's approach keeps the whole distribution in play, so a price that was optimal on a slow Tuesday can quietly shift when a competitor runs a promotion or a shipment runs late. For a retailer, the appeal is less about squeezing an extra dollar out of any single sale and more about never leaving margin on the table across thousands of products at once.

That line - a nod to the old "let me Google that for you" - is Yaman's shorthand for how he wants people to treat artificial intelligence. Use it to get to the answer faster. Do not use it to skip the thinking. His stated philosophy on AI adoption is blunt: "Supplement, not replace." Even as he builds a company whose product is an algorithm, he keeps returning to the limits of automation, arguing that people "reflexively gravitate toward authenticity" and that the teams who win with AI will be the ones who know what to keep human.

A recession as a starting gun

Yaman did not set out to build software. He earned a B.S. in economics and then a law degree, both from the University of Michigan, graduating law school in 2008. He arrived in New York, by his own telling, roughly 48 hours before Lehman Brothers collapsed and took the global economy down with it. It was a spectacularly bad moment to be a new lawyer looking for corporate work - and, as it turned out, a useful one to be young, unattached, and willing to try something else.

He pivoted into technology during the startup boom that grew out of the wreckage. His first company was acquired by a Bay Area firm, which gave him an early, close-up education in venture capital and how startups actually get built and sold. It was the apprenticeship that made the next act possible.

Ten years inside the retail wars

In 2013 Yaman co-founded Boxed, an online wholesale retailer built on a simple, contrarian idea: sell bulk household essentials online, without the membership card and the trip to a warehouse in the suburbs. As COO, head of software, and a board member, he helped scale the operation across the continental United States and pushed the company to invest heavily in its own technology rather than rent it. Boxed was, in effect, competing at once with Walmart, Costco, and Amazon - three of the most formidable operators in commerce.

It lasted a decade. During the pandemic, Boxed became something close to essential infrastructure, moving toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and cleaning supplies to households that could not find them anywhere else. The company went public. Then, like many pandemic-era retail stories, it eventually wound down its operations. Yaman came out of it with something more durable than the stock ticker: a deep, hard-won understanding of the machinery of pricing, and the software his team had built to run it.

The bet inside Boxed was always partly a technology bet. Yaman pushed the company to build rather than buy the systems that mattered, and pricing was near the center of that decision. When you are a comparatively small operator standing between Amazon's logistics and Costco's buying power, the software you own becomes one of the few structural advantages you can actually control. That instinct - own the hard part - is the seed of the company he runs now.

Spresso: the second draft

Spresso is, in a sense, Boxed's pricing engine set free. Yaman became CEO in 2023 and spun the commerce and pricing technology into a standalone company aimed at any retailer, CPG brand, or ecommerce operator that wants sophisticated price optimization without building a data-science team from scratch. The pitch leans on the credibility of its origin: this is not a tool dreamed up in a lab, but one forged inside a real retailer fighting for margin against the biggest names in the business.

The proof point came in 2024, when Spresso's technology was selected to power the relaunch of Boxed.com - the very brand its founder had helped build. The company also closed a Series A round, with investors reported to include BlackRock, and Yaman has spent the stretch since on podcasts and in interviews talking through the unglamorous mechanics of SaaS pivots, enterprise pricing, and capital efficiency. Spresso today runs on a modern stack - Node, TypeScript, Python, Kubernetes, Snowflake, and optimization tooling among it - and markets itself around pricing intelligence, dynamic pricing, and spend analytics.

He has not built Spresso alone. Public records list co-founders alongside him, and the company has grown to a team of roughly three dozen people spread across the usual startup functions of engineering, data, and go-to-market. Yaman has spent the past two years doing the founder's second job - explaining the product to anyone who will listen. He has turned up on founder and SaaS podcasts to talk through the mechanics of a pivot, the discipline of capital efficiency, and the specific challenge of selling enterprise pricing software into organizations that are often nervous about handing an algorithm the keys to their margins.

That nervousness is a recurring theme, and Yaman treats it as a feature of the sale rather than a bug. Pricing is one of the most sensitive levers a business has; get it wrong in public and customers notice fast. So the pitch is not "trust the black box." It is closer to "keep your hand on the dial." Merchants set the guardrails - the floors, the ceilings, the rules - and the software optimizes inside them. It is a posture that fits neatly with his broader line about AI: the machine handles the search space, the human keeps the judgment.

What he keeps coming back to

Ask Yaman what carried him through a decade of retail combat, a pandemic, an IPO, and a wind-down, and the answers he gives are unglamorous: persistence, curiosity, problem-solving. He is not selling a story of overnight genius. He is selling the value of staying with a problem long enough to understand it - the way pricing quietly decides whether a business lives or dies, and how few operators ever get to see it up close.

There is a through-line in how he talks about technology, too. For all that Spresso automates, Yaman keeps insisting on the human edge. He wants AI to answer the routine question so people can spend their attention on the ones that require taste, trust, and judgment. In a market rushing to automate everything that can be automated, his contrarian note is that the last mile of commerce is still a person deciding whether they believe you. That belief, more than any single algorithm, is the thing he seems intent on protecting as he builds.

For now, the work is the same work it has always been for him: take a genuinely hard problem, build the software that makes it tractable, and stay long enough to get it right. Boxed was the first draft. Spresso is the rewrite - and this time, the pricing engine is the whole point.