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AI-Powered Delivery: How Bill Catania Scaled OneRail to 300K Orders Daily · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  Shop Talk is one of the largest commerce conferences in the world, bringing together thousands of founders, operators, and retail leaders who are actively building what comes next.
• 0:13
  Today's episode comes to you from the floor of shop talk, spring 2026 in Las Vegas, where I caught up with some of the sharpest operators and founders in retail.
• 0:25
  Let's get into it.
• 0:31
  All right.
• 0:31
  Bill Catano, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 0:34
  I appreciate it.
• 0:35
  Glad to be here.
• 0:36
  Absolutely.
• 0:36
  We're glad to have you.
• 0:38
  So, Bill, you are the founder and the CEO of OneRail.
• 0:42
  So you are a, I guess, a tech delivery platform where you have over 12 million drivers.
• 0:52
  When I first read that stat, I was blown away because I didn't even realize there was 12 million delivery drivers.
• 0:58
  That many.
• 0:58
  But I guess can you talk to the listeners about what you do?
• 1:02
  So we one rail saying they have 12 million drivers.
• 1:06
  It would be similar to Expedia saying they have millions of hotel rooms.
• 1:10
  We're an aggregator, so what we've done is we've gone out, we've curated this last mile delivery network, building a network of networks.
• 1:18
  So we have the likes of DoorDash and Uber in our network, but we also have over 1,000 networks you've never heard of that are professional couriers.
• 1:26
  We're with W2 employees, as well as other gig couriers like Goshare and Bungee.
• 1:31
  This network has a range from sedans all the way up through box trucks, depending on what the order is.
• 1:37
  So, yeah, we're real proud of that.
• 1:38
  It is a huge number and that's what allows us to execute our business model.
• 1:43
  Okay, and so you were founded in 2018?
• 1:46
  Yes.
• 1:46
  And from day one, you've been AI native?
• 1:49
  Yes.
• 1:50
  So in 2018, when we were founded, we started out our life as a tech connected courier.
• 1:55
  So we went out and found drivers.
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  We.
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  We put them through kind of the onboarding process, we vetted them for insurance and safety, and then we went out with a consumer app and let customers order delivery.
• 2:08
  And we also did some home moving.
• 2:10
  After doing that for about a year and a half, we decided we wanted to pivot because we realized there's a dire need to have one operating system for Last mile Fulfillment.
• 2:22
  It didn't exist.
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  TMS solutions weren't doing the job.
• 2:25
  They didn't have granularity to these local courier networks.
• 2:28
  So what we decided was let's build that technology that can plug right into a retailer and then let's go bring all the capacity to the retailer in an aggregated network.
• 2:39
  And that's really what solves the problem, we kind of take all the friction away from the problem.
• 2:44
  So it was in 2020 that we really deployed what we call OmniPoint, which is our AI native software solution.
• 2:52
  And yes, it was AI native from the first line of code.
• 2:55
  Okay.
• 2:56
  And so at that time, 2019, when you have this epiphany and you decide to make that pivot, I mean grand vision sounds great, especially now, but what was it like building that when it didn't exist?
• 3:11
  Well, I'm a three time now startup founder, so I'm used to starting with nothing.
• 3:17
  It was honestly, it was a blast.
• 3:21
  Just I hadn't spent a day of my life in supply chain or logistics.
• 3:25
  My last company pioneered the digital coupon space.
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  It was bought by Inmar and became the backbone of what's powering over 70% of the digital paperless coupons in the US.
• 3:37
  So my background is there.
• 3:39
  It's really shopper marketing and payments.
• 3:41
  And then I had a problem as a consumer getting a refrigerator delivered.
• 3:45
  That's what really started this.
• 3:47
  That's the idea.
• 3:49
  The retailer told me it would take 10 days to get the refrigerator and when your refrigerator dies, like you need it the same day.
• 3:55
  So that's what started me down this journey of just learning, being a student, experimenting.
• 4:00
  And it was, it was gratifying to bootstrap a startup and just get the learnings myself, raised a little bit of capital and finally once we really, I think had product market fit, started to raise real venture capital.
• 4:13
  Okay.
• 4:14
  All right.
• 4:14
  And then once the finished product, OmniPoint launched in 2020, what's been the trajectory thereafter?
• 4:23
  Our last five years.
• 4:24
  So if you look at our compound annual growth rate of net revenue, we're 105% the last five years.
• 4:30
  So essentially doubling year over year for five years.
• 4:33
  And we're on track to do the same thing this year.
• 4:35
  And that was prior to the FedEx announcement.
• 4:37
  So this model is significantly different than any other business model in Last Mile.
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  Typically you're either a software company or you're a carrier.
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  We're both because we're providing kind of that whole turnkey solution.
• 4:50
  So we just have a much better unit economic model and that's what's allowed us to grow.
• 4:57
  Currently doing around 300,000 deliveries a day.
• 5:00
  If you're in our office, we have all the metrics on the wall.
• 5:03
  You can see between 50 and 100 deliveries a second coming in in the morning.
• 5:07
  It's amazing to see.
• 5:09
  Okay, and what's it been?
• 5:11
  Like you mentioned earlier, it's been a blast.
• 5:13
  And you're a three time founder and joy of bootstrapping and learning.
• 5:17
  But when you talk about that type of growth consistently and through since 2020, since we had Covid through now and the whole boom of AI and we'll get into agentic AI and all that, like how do you, how
• 5:32
  do you manage and scale that and still just operate at such a high level for your customers?
• 5:39
  I would be completely lying to you, which I'm not going to do if I told you it was easy, it was so hard.
• 5:45
  And I've had my last company scaled but nothing like this.
• 5:50
  We were bought by a much bigger company and then we grew a team from 15 to 100 within a few years.
• 5:55
  We grew this to 300 within a few years.
• 5:57
  I mean this was my wife and I sitting at the kitchen table coming up with this.
• 6:01
  So it's challenged me as a leader in a lot of ways that I hadn't been challenged before.
• 6:07
  But as long you just have to have an open mind to realizing you've got to work through people, you've got to be able to find great leaders and let them do their job.
• 6:15
  And when I look at the other startups that I had, I was terrible at that.
• 6:19
  I wanted to micromanage everything and I learned by necessity that this would never scale if I didn't work through people.
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  So I've actually had a lot of learnings on this journey.
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  This is far bigger than anything I've ever created and I think we're just getting started.
• 6:35
  Wow.
• 6:36
  Okay.
• 6:36
  Okay, love that.
• 6:37
  And so we're here at Shop Talk and the show is all about AI.
• 6:42
  There's AI companies everywhere, everyone's talking about their AI.
• 6:46
  So how do you especially having such success and operating at such a high level within the industry for these retail partners, how do you see AI changing retail within the next year?
• 6:59
  Well, I can tell you from a one rail perspective, if we didn't leverage AI at the core of our solution, we would have over 5,000 employees dispatching orders every day.
• 7:10
  And there's, there's no way we could do this.
• 7:12
  Like we couldn't afford to hire 5,000.
• 7:15
  I don't care what country we're talking about, you're not hiring 5,000 people without a lot of capital and a lot of coordination.
• 7:21
  The platform is, is exceptionally intuitive, it's self learning.
• 7:26
  And what we're doing is we're looking at a delivery, let's say that delivery order comes in, we're looking at the zip code, where is the delivery, what is the product?
• 7:34
  That's actually being delivered, we're looking at the speed.
• 7:38
  What's the customer promise?
• 7:39
  Is it 30 minutes, is it an hour, is it same day?
• 7:41
  Anytime we take all those parameters and then we look at that network in real time.
• 7:47
  What delivery companies do we have that could service this?
• 7:51
  And AI, the AI component understands and learns the demand cycle of all of our carriers.
• 7:58
  So we know which carriers are busy at certain times of day.
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  Based on all the historical data, we know which ones have a higher probability of being on time.
• 8:08
  And then within 200 milliseconds, all this stuff happens that I'm talking about in less than a second, about 200 milliseconds, like a credit card payment.
• 8:15
  We dispatch it automatically and then once that happens, it's a live delivery.
• 8:21
  And then our team takes over from there.
• 8:23
  We have a team, about 90 people that are managing delivery exceptions.
• 8:28
  So things that happen, items aren't all in the order or the address isn't fully baked yet.
• 8:34
  So it's not in Google Maps.
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  We're reading a whole bunch of different mapping solutions.
• 8:39
  Trimble, Google here.
• 8:41
  And our team will actually call customers on behalf of our customers.
• 8:45
  So they'll make a phone call and say, hey, I'm calling on behalf of your Lowe's delivery today.
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  I'm calling on behalf of your advanced auto parts delivery today.
• 8:52
  I just wanna let you know it's gonna be 10 minutes late or I want you to know we can't find your house.
• 8:57
  So we've even managed to infuse AI into that process and we've cut the cost to support delivery down by about 70% in the last six quarters.
• 9:08
  Wow.
• 9:09
  Okay.
• 9:09
  All right.
• 9:10
  And just given this journey you talked about and how far you've come and where you're at with the company today, what would you say has been the best part of it?
• 9:20
  It's a, that's a probably one of the hardest questions I've ever had, but I'm going to do my best.
• 9:25
  I think what's gratifying is to build a team of people and see them grow like they've all been challenged.
• 9:34
  We, we have a team, you know, there's a lot of people on our team that, that haven't scaled something to this level.
• 9:40
  To watch them find new skill sets, to up level their skill sets, and to watch somebody who's never managed a team build a team of 20 people.
• 9:49
  We have a school teacher, an ex school teacher that came in as an office manager and today she runs a department of 20 people.
• 9:56
  And it's one of the best run departments in the company.
• 9:59
  It's one of the highest kind of compliance around KPI.
• 10:02
  Metric driven department being managed by KPI's of any department in the company.
• 10:08
  So just watching the team grow, you know, it's always gratifying to see a new customer go live.
• 10:12
  That's exciting.
• 10:13
  But the personal wins are watching this team rise to the occasion.
• 10:18
  Love that.
• 10:18
  Love that.
• 10:19
  Okay, and if brands are hearing this, they want to learn more about OneRail.
• 10:22
  What's the best way they can do that?
• 10:23
  You can always go to onerail.com we have a website where you can sign up for a number of different demonstrations.
• 10:31
  One rail, we talked a lot about the FedEx same day local announcement.
• 10:35
  Obviously that's the topic of the day.
• 10:37
  But OneRail also does a lot with internal fleets, companies that own their own trucks.
• 10:42
  So if you own your own fleet, you can find, you know, and sign up for a demo on our website.
• 10:47
  We save own fleet owners a tremendous amount of money and how we optimize.
• 10:52
  And with rising gas costs, that's a big topic.
• 10:54
  So onerail.com okay.
• 10:56
  All right, Bill, thanks so much.
• 10:58
  Thank you.
• 10:58
  I appreciate it.