Melissa
Wong

She Built the Fix
After Living the Bug

Melissa Wong did not arrive at Zipline through a pitch competition or a shower thought. She arrived after spending more than a decade at Gap Inc. and Old Navy watching the same scene repeat itself under four different brand presidents: a strategy crafted in San Francisco with care and precision, sent down the chain, and landing on store floors as noise.

Her job at Old Navy was to bridge that gap - to make the "big new strategy" land in the real world of stock rooms and registers and associates juggling five things at once. She was good at it. And yet, even being good at it, she kept losing.

So before founding Zipline in 2014, she did what founders rarely do: she picked up the phone and called peers across every retail brand she could reach. Were they dealing with the same problem? Every single one said yes. The communication breakdown between headquarters and the store floor was not a Gap quirk or an Old Navy failure. It was a structural crack running through the entire industry.

Melissa Wong calls herself a "reluctant entrepreneur." Before Zipline, she had built her career inside institutions - first at Horn Group, a San Francisco PR agency where she climbed from Account Coordinator to Senior Account Executive, then at Gap Inc. where she spent nearly seven years as Senior Manager for Corporate Communications.

When she decided to start Zipline, she had no tech background and no fundraising playbook. What she had was twelve years of watching the problem from the inside - knowing exactly who it hurt, how it compounded, and what a solution needed to feel like for the person using it at 6am before a store opened.

Her fundraising approach became a kind of philosophy: incremental courage. Pitch one investor at a time. Build confidence from small wins. Don't wait for certainty that won't come. It's the same approach she preaches to store managers now - clarity over comfort, execution over perfection.

Her co-founder Jeremy Baker (now CTO) provided the technical architecture. Wong built everything else: the vision, the customer relationships, the fundraising narrative, the brand culture. By 2021 that combination had earned a $30M Series B led by Fifth Wall, with Emergence Capital, Ridge Ventures, and Veeva co-founder Matt Wallach joining the round. Total capital raised: $39.6 million.

Operations
for the Store Floor

Zipline is an operations platform for field teams inside brick-and-mortar retail. The pitch is deceptively simple: get the right message to the right person at the right time. In practice, that means replacing the tangle of forwarded emails, outdated portals, binder-stuffed task lists, and AM huddles with a platform that personalizes every directive by role, location, and performance.

Store employees see only what's relevant to them. District managers see what's getting done and what's not. And headquarters finally has visibility into whether their promotions, trainings, and compliance requirements are actually landing - before the customer shows up expecting the thing that isn't there.

Zipline integrates with the tools retailers already use: HR platforms, business intelligence software, POS systems. It's the connective tissue, not a replacement. That positioning has helped it land customers including Gap, Sephora, American Eagle Outfitters, O'Reilly Auto Parts, 7-Eleven, Lush Cosmetics, L.L.Bean, and Cole Haan.

Melissa Wong's management philosophy has a clear origin story. Early in her career at Old Navy, a manager named Kim showed her what it looked like to lead with both compassion and courage - to be genuinely kind while still holding a high bar. That template has stayed with her through two decades of career and a company she's built from scratch.

She talks about psychological safety not as a HR buzzword but as an operational necessity. Stores don't execute because people are lazy - they fail because associates don't have the clarity to act confidently. The same principle runs through how she builds her team: people do better work when they're not afraid to surface what isn't working.

Her belief in AI as an enabler fits this philosophy. She sees the technology not as a replacement for frontline workers but as a tool that personalizes coaching, surfaces performance patterns, and gives associates access to answers they'd otherwise have to wait hours for. The vision is a store associate who has the same resources at 6am as a senior analyst at headquarters.

When Zipline raised its Series B in March 2021, the company had already doubled its customer base through the pandemic - a period when many retail platforms struggled. The thesis Wong had built on held: in a crisis, frontline communication is not a nice-to-have.

Brands that could get updated protocols to every associate, in every store, on the same day - and confirm it was read - had a clear operational advantage over those relying on email chains and conference calls.

By 2026, Zipline had grown to serve more than 150 retail brands globally. The platform earned a CB Insights ranking as one of the 100 most promising B2B retail tech companies in the world, an honorable mention in Fast Company's World-Changing Ideas, and a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies.

The customer roster runs across sectors: fashion (Gap, Sephora, American Eagle, Cole Haan, TOMS, Torrid), grocery (Hy-Vee), home (LL Flooring), auto (O'Reilly Auto Parts), convenience (7-Eleven), outdoor/specialty (L.L.Bean), and beyond. The common thread: distributed teams, complex communications, and a need to know the thing actually happened.