Sushanth Raman

There is a Sunday afternoon in the story of Pallet - and it is not the Sunday when Sushanth Raman signed a term sheet or rang a funding bell. It is a Sunday in a dispatch floor somewhere in the American interior, where he watched a logistics coordinator manually enter over 100 bills of lading into a system that could have automated every single one. The man had no choice. His customers refused to use EDI. He just typed.

Raman was not visiting as a VC doing due diligence. He was a founder doing the only kind of research that actually works: showing up. He spent six months in warehouses, ports, truck yards, and dispatch floors before building anything. He logged more hours in Memphis and Arkansas than in San Francisco. That fieldwork became the product thesis for Pallet - and eventually, the pitch that landed $50 million.

"Every single one of those trips taught me something no founder dinner or tech meetup ever could," he has said. The quote matters because it explains why Pallet is not another logistics software layer built by engineers who have never stood in a truck yard. It is built by someone who has.

Raman grew up with a grandfather who ran a food distribution business. Freight was not an abstraction - it was dinner-table reality. That early exposure gave him a sense of the physical stakes of supply chains that pure software people rarely have. When he arrived at Columbia University to study computer science and economics, he was already carrying a mental model of how goods move through the world.

At Columbia, he graduated with distinction - named a Charles Prescott Davis Scholar (top 10% of the engineering class) and inducted into Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society that accepts the top 8%. But the achievement that shaped his founder trajectory most was not an award. It was an email. He cold-emailed a Bain Capital Ventures partner while still an undergraduate. That partner - Kevin Zhang - became his mentor, his first investor, and eventually the lead on both Pallet's seed round and its Series A.

Raman took the route that many promising Columbia engineers take: Microsoft, then Google. Both as a product manager. Both formative. Neither final. By 2020, he had joined Retool - the low-code platform that was then a fast-growing startup - as one of its early engineers, working across both engineering and sales. It was at Retool that he met Andrew Spencer, the co-founder who would eventually join him at Pallet. Spencer's father runs engineering at MercuryGate, a major transportation management system vendor. Freight was in both their DNA.

Pallet launched in 2022. The timing was deliberate - the logistics industry was flush with capital after the supply-chain disruptions of the COVID era, and every company suddenly understood, viscerally, how fragile its operations were when humans could not show up to do manual work. The sell was no longer theoretical.

The product is called CoPallet, and the best way to understand it is not through the marketing language of "AI workforce" but through the Sunday afternoon image: it does the manual work that nobody should have to do. Order entry. Quoting. Portal updates. Carrier handoffs. Shipment tracking. It reads shipping instructions, tenders loads across ocean, rail, and final-mile modes, and updates TMS, carrier portals, and customer systems in real time - working inside existing software rather than replacing it.

The numbers are specific in a way that matters: 10x faster completion, 50-70% cost reduction versus traditional staffing, 70% daily usage among customer employees. One customer reallocated 25 employees after deploying it - not layoffs, reallocation. That specificity is the signature of a company that has built something that works rather than something that demos well.

"What Pallet really is, is like a modern OS for moving any physical product from point A to B," Raman said in a TechCrunch interview in October 2024. The vision is not incremental: "An order starts and gets sent to you, and you can deliver it without a human in the loop. I think that's where the whole industry is headed."

In May 2025, Pallet closed a $27 million Series B led by General Catalyst. The round came seven months after a $18 million Series A and brought total funding to $50 million. The detail that Raman shared publicly about the raise is more interesting than the number: "We hadn't spent most of the capital from the last round."

That is an unusual thing for a founder to say in a funding announcement. It is also the most persuasive sentence in the entire press release. Capital efficiency is a choice, not a circumstance. It means the Series B was raised from a position of strength, not need. Raman explained it plainly: "I felt like the industry was going through a big change and wanted to accelerate our momentum on our product and enterprise sales motion."

The macroeconomic context amplified the timing. Tariff volatility in 2025 was forcing every logistics operator to rethink cost structures. The companies that had depended on cheap manual labor for back-office operations suddenly faced pressure to automate - not as a long-term aspiration, but as a near-term survival decision. Pallet was positioned exactly there.

Marc Bhargava of General Catalyst said the company has "the potential to be a multi-billion dollar opportunity." Raman did not quote that line when he announced the round. He quoted the math instead.

Raman has been public about how he builds teams. "Hire for spike-y people. One person who's elite at one thing beats well-rounded generalists all the time." It is a philosophy that reflects how Pallet itself was built - not by covering every base, but by finding people with extreme depth in specific domains. The company's team includes former logistics professionals from Worldwide Express, CEVA, and Uber Freight alongside ex-YC founders and engineers from Meta, Scale AI, and Rippling. Deep domain knowledge and elite technical execution in the same organization.

He is also direct about what separates people in early-stage companies: "Being smart isn't enough. Taste, conviction, and relentless energy are the differentiators." That last phrase is not filler. It is autobiographical - the founder who cold-emailed VCs in college, who spent half a year in truck yards, who closed a Series B without needing one.