Teardown

Daily digest · 2026-07-14

Scan #003: The rails and the raiders

Eight companies — four emerging, four entrenched — and a recurring pattern: the incumbents' moat is a system of record nobody wants to rip out, and the challengers are all betting that stops being true.

Eight today, split four emerging and four entrenched. Read together, they describe one trade: the entrenched half owns the system of record and monetizes the fact that migration is painful; the emerging half is a wager that AI finally makes migration cheap enough to be worth it. Two of the entrenched four are winning that argument. Two are not.

Higharc — Construction · Emerging. $95M Series C led by Insight (June 30), total past $170M, paired with a US LBM materials deal. It models homes as 3D spatial databases and generates permit-ready construction documents from them. The tension the funding announcements skip: G2 reviewers say the document sets come out incomplete, and the architect of record still stamps the drawings and still eats the error. A product whose core claim is “permit-ready” cannot afford that gap.

Faire — Ecommerce · Emerging. The wholesale marketplace reset to $5.2B in a November 2025 tender — a 59% cut from its $12.59B peak. It underwrites the retailer’s credit, which is the real product. But it charges 15% not just on the first order but on every reorder, forever, from any retailer it sourced — the “Faire tax” — and Shopify B2B plus its own Faire Direct are both off-ramps for brands who resent it.

Corgi — Insurance · Emerging. Founded 2024, already ~$374M raised and marked at $2.6B in May 2026 — a Series B1 that landed three weeks after the Series B, at double the price. It is not a conventional carrier: risk sits in an unrated Arizona risk retention group reinsured by a captive inside Corgi’s own family, with no AM Best rating and no guaranty-fund access. It is writing long-tail D&O and cyber on roughly a year of loss history. ~65x premium.

Crusoe — Energy · Emerging. Reportedly in talks at ~$30B (Bloomberg, July 2). The flared-gas story is now mostly a legacy: the revenue engine is data-center development and 15-year leases, anchored by Abilene/Stargate. The Texas Tribune reported on July 9 that Abilene’s 10 turbines and 62 diesel generators were permitted with no public comment, at 1.6M tons of GHG a year, with 41 more turbines pending.

Bob’s Discount Furniture — Retail · Incumbent, at risk. IPO’d Feb 4 at $17; trades at $15.70. FY2025’s +16.8% revenue growth was substantially a gift from the Conn’s, Badcock and Big Lots liquidations. Comps have decelerated from +7.7% to +1.2%. Meanwhile 63% of product cost is now Vietnamese, and the furniture tariff steps from 25% to 30% in January 2027. Bain still holds ~75% and the lock-up expires August 4.

C.H. Robinson — Logistics · Incumbent, well positioned. On February 12 a former karaoke company published a white paper claiming AI could run 2,000+ loads per broker against a ~500 benchmark; CHRW fell 24% intraday. That was the market pricing disintermediation. But CHRW is the one running the automation — adjusted operating margin is 26.6% and shipments per person per day are up 40% since 2022. It is currently the beneficiary of the thing it was sold off for.

Blue Yonder — Supply chain · Incumbent, at risk. Panasonic paid ~$8.5B in 2021 and announced an IPO in 2022 that still has not happened. SaaS growth decelerated to 10.4% and net revenue retention is 103.8% — sub-105% for a system of record is a slow leak. Then in November 2024 a ransomware attack took down Starbucks payroll and UK grocery warehouses. This is the incumbent Auger is aiming at, and the numbers say the aim is good.

Applied Systems — Insurance · Incumbent, well positioned. The agency management system half of a duopoly with Vertafore, and the sort of software that outlives its customers’ careers. Independent agents complain bitterly about pricing under PE ownership and are structurally unable to leave, which is precisely the investment case. Note the honest gap: the “$12B valuation” repeated across the internet is a cumulative capital raised figure, not a mark. The last disclosed transaction value is still $1.8B, in 2014.

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