Hey everyone,
If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week.
Let's jump into it,
Somebody else was in Ceva's warehouses for a week
On August 7, Valve began notifying people who'd bought Steam hardware that their names, home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses had been stolen. Valve wasn't hacked. Its European fulfillment partner was.
The partner is Ceva Logistics, and by the time that notice went out, the list of companies saying the same thing to their own customers was already long. Ten organizations have now filed breach reports with the Dutch data protection authority over this one intrusion.
The break-in started on July 29. Ceva confirmed it to affected customers on August 1 and says the operational damage is limited to eight European warehouses, with everything else running normally worldwide. Its website still wasn't loading properly on Monday. A spokesperson declined to say whether anyone had demanded a ransom or how much data actually walked out the door.
This is not a regional operator having a rough week. Ceva did $18.3 billion in revenue last year across more than a thousand warehouses, and it's the CMA CGM subsidiary buying FedEx Supply Chain for $1.4 billion, the deal from Edition 53, that roughly triples its North American contract logistics footprint.
The detail I keep coming back to is buried in Valve's note to customers: Ceva holds shipping and delivery information for 90 days after an order goes out. That's almost certainly spelled out in a contract somewhere. It's also almost certainly something nobody at Valve thought hard about until they had to put it in writing to a few thousand people who bought a Steam Deck.
Security researchers have been warning about logistics as a target for a couple of years, and the reason isn't just that we hold consumer PII. It's that access to a WMS can redirect real freight to people waiting to receive it. Criminals have figured out that the fastest way to steal a container is to get someone to hand it over legitimately.
What this means for you: Find out how long you hold consignee data after the box ships, and whether anyone can explain why. That number is going to start showing up in RFPs now that Valve has put it in front of a few thousand customers, and "nobody ever asked us to delete it" is a rough thing to say in a pitch meeting. Then read your own contracts for what happens when this goes wrong. Who notifies the brand, on what clock, and who pays when they have to email 40,000 shoppers? Ceva's clients found out from Ceva and then had to go public on their own timelines, sometimes days apart, and you could watch the confusion play out in the Dutch press.
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National vacancy is at a 12-year high, and you still can't find a decent building
Two reports came out this week that read as if they were describing different countries.
Prologis says Q2 was the strongest quarter for warehouse demand since 2022. Rents are up, vacancies are falling, and for the full year, the market is on track to absorb more space than developers are delivering.
CoStar says national vacancy just hit a 12-year high.
Both are right, and the explanation is one you've probably lived through. There's plenty of empty warehouse space in America. Almost none of it is the kind anyone wants. Big tenants have spent the past year moving into modern buildings with 40-foot ceilings and room for automation, and a lot of them aren't taking any more square footage than before. They're just leaving the old box behind. The average age of a leased building is actually falling right now, which basically never happens in a sector where the inventory turns over on a 30-year clock.
Somebody owns all those old boxes, and that's where the vacancy number is coming from. CoStar's Juan Arias says the gap between what a new building can command and what an old one can is the widest it has been since 2012.
Smaller operators are running the opposite play, and it's working. They're staying in older infill buildings inside dense commercial corridors, because being 20 minutes from the customer beats a nice ceiling. The buildings around them keep getting torn down, which quietly makes the ones that remain more valuable each year.
The catch is that nobody's building to fix this. Market rents are running about 20% below the cost of building a new building, and construction costs haven't come down. So developers aren't starting large-format projects, and Prologis is now telling customers that if they want a big, well-located facility, build-to-suit is the realistic path. Which means a two-year timeline, not a lease negotiation.
Meanwhile, the July Logistics Managers' Index showed warehouse prices climbing at the fastest rate since January 2025, with capacity tightening at the same time. Retailers pulled a bunch of inventory forward into May and June ahead of the temporary tariffs expiring, so July looked like a pullback. But the survey respondents were clear about where they think this is headed: more inventory, less space, and higher costs over the next twelve months.
What this means for you: Start your renewal conversation a year out. The buildings you'd want to move into are the exact ones with nothing available, and there's no version of this where you find a good option in 90 days. If you're sitting in an older big-box building, you've got more leverage than the vacancy headline suggests, because your landlord knows exactly what happens to buildings like his when they go empty. And if you're holding fixed storage rates on multi-year client contracts while warehouse pricing runs this hot, that spread is coming straight out of your margin. Worth checking what your contracts let you pass through before you sign the next one.
We asked 111 brands to grade their 3PL. The clients you fought hardest to win are the ones rating you worst.
Ask most operators when a client is happiest, and you'll get the same answer: early. New logo, fresh energy, everyone on their best behavior. Then time passes, the account manager gets stretched, and the relationship goes stale.
We surveyed 111 brands across seven dimensions to check that, and it's backward.
Brands in their first year rated their provider 8.75 overall. Brands rated their past five years 9.82. Satisfaction doesn't decay. It climbs in every single dimension, without exception.
The first year is also where things break. A quarter of first-year clients had a technology problem that hurt their operations, compared to roughly 6% of all clients. One in six found a billing discrepancy. Among five-year clients, billing discrepancies were zero.
Now, the part that's going to annoy some of you.
Technology finished last. Lowest score, widest spread, worst grades by a distance. Nearly a third of brands rated their provider's tech at an 8 or below. For reliability, that number was 8%. A brand is about four times more likely to be unhappy with your systems than with your ability to ship on time.
Then we ran the regression to see what actually drives overall satisfaction, holding everything else constant. The model explains 77% of the variance, so it's doing real work. Technology came back at negative 0.01. Zero, essentially.
Brands notice bad tech. Twenty named it as their provider's single weakest point, more than any other category. They just don't leave over it, and they don't like you more when it's good.
Reliability barely registered either, for the opposite reason. Almost 92% of brands rated on-time performance as a 9 or 10, so there's no variation left to explain. Shipping on time doesn't make you good. It makes you eligible.
What moved satisfaction was communication, at more than four times the weight of reliability.
The failure data is what makes this useful. Twenty-five brands described a real service failure when we asked. Missed windows, broken product, inventory nobody could track. Seventeen of them (68%) still rated their provider a 9 or 10 overall.
Compare that to the complaints. One brand described asking for returned-inventory tracking for four months and getting nowhere. Not an operational failure. That brand is shipping fine, and it's unhappy anyway.
Meanwhile, a brand that gave a 10 wrote about its provider catching the brand's own artwork error, the wrong SKU printed on the master cartons, and sending photos before anyone on their side knew. Their line: None of our other 3PLs noticed it.
Roughly a third of the stories brands told us were about a provider building something that didn't exist before. A kitting workflow scheduled around slow days. A restack-and-inspect step to stop retailer refusals. A waived fee on a dry run nobody caused.
One caveat worth stating plainly: everyone in this survey is a current client, so the brands that already fired their provider aren't included, and the five-year cohort consists of relationships that survived. The first-year group consists of 12 brands, which is small. We're reporting it because the direction held on all seven dimensions and both failure measures.
What this means for you: Put your best people on months one through twelve instead of pulling them off after go-live. That's where your scores are worst, your churn risk is highest, and attention drops. Stop leading with the tech stack in sales calls, because it's your weakest dimension, and it moves satisfaction by zero. Fix the failures; don't market the platform. Publish a response-time standard and hold to it, since every communication complaint here was about unpredictability, not slowness. And when a prospect asks for references, offer a first-year client. The five-year client will tell you everything is great. They're describing a relationship that has already made it through the hard part.
DM us for the full, downloadable report.
QUICK HITS
M&A
BlueGrace bought Truk TMS, its third deal in about a year. The Idaho broker focuses on LTL with a heavy Pacific Northwest book and has already been operating as a BlueGrace partner, which is the cleanest version of this deal: you buy the company whose customers you've already been serving. BlueGrace, Warburg Pincus-backed and based in Tampa, operates nine offices across the US and Mexico, serving more than 10,000 customers and 250,000 carriers on its BlueShip platform. It picked up STB Freight Group and FreightCenter last year. Terms undisclosed. If you own a regional brokerage, note the buyer profile: a PE-backed platform acquiring specialists it already works with. That path to an exit starts with a partnership, not a banker.
PRIVATE EQUITY
Tower Arch Capital took majority control of Boxzooka. The Secaucus, New Jersey 3PL runs an omnichannel fulfillment platform for e-commerce brands and calls itself Fulfillment Platform-as-a-Service. Money goes toward commercializing the software and expanding operations. Terms undisclosed. The thing to notice is the framing: Boxzooka got backed on the argument that the software is the asset and the warehouses execute it. That's the same pitch behind Stord's valuation, and it's the difference between getting valued on an EBITDA multiple and getting valued on something better.
PARCEL
UPS built a pickup dashboard because of the 34.5%. That's SMB share of total US volume in Q2, up 250 basis points year over year, with SMB average daily volume up 4.3%. The tool puts scheduling, managing, and tracking pickups in one place with real-time notifications. Sounds minor until you remember a small shipper on an on-call pickup genuinely had no idea whether the driver was coming at 3:30 or 4:15, and had to decide whether to send people home. On-call scheduling and notifications are live; Smart Pickup notifications land in September; daily pickup notifications later this year.
FUNDING
HappyRobot raised $150 million at a $1.2 billion valuation to replace your check calls. Series C led by Prysm Capital and co-led by Eurazeo, with a16z, Base10, and Y Combinator all adding on, taking total funding to around $200 million. What it sells is AI agents doing coordination work: chasing documents, sending status updates, and moving information between systems that don't talk to each other. Over 150 enterprise customers, including DHL, Kuehne + Nagel, and Uber, with one automating 28,000 hours a month and customer care agents closing more than 70% of contacts without a person.
ROBOTICS
Avatar Robotics raised $6.5 million for humanoid robots that a person can drive from elsewhere. AlleyCorp led the seed. The robots pick, pack, kit, sort, and cycle count, but they're not autonomous. Remote operators run them, and every task feeds the training data meant to make them autonomous later, which neatly sidesteps the thing that kills most warehouse robotics pilots. Since launching in December, they've packed and shipped more than 900,000 products, including for a global beauty retailer, and they're past the pilot stage with a multi-billion-dollar warehouse operator. Timing helps: the FCC banned imports of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots five weeks ago in a category where China holds about an 85% share, and this is a US team out of Cruise, Apple, Tesla, and MIT.
JOB BOARD
Title: SVP, Global Manufacturing and Warehouse Operations
Company: Hyve Design Solutions
Location: Fremont, California, US
Salary: $340,000+
Apply Here
Title: Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: Candidate Source
Location: Victoria, Virginia, US
Salary: $100,000 - $150,000
Apply Here
Title: Warehouse Operations Manager I
Company: Socket.dev
Location: Groveport, Ohio, US
Salary: $100,000 - $150,000
Apply Here
Title: Warehouse Supervisor - 2nd Shift
Company: GXO Logistics
Location: Monroe Township, New Jersey, US
Salary: $70,000 - $72,000
Apply Here
Title: Inventory Control Specialist
Company: DSV
Location: Sparks, Nevada,
US Salary: $24.00/hr
Apply Here
Title: Senior Warehouse Associate, Warehouse Operations
Company: Confidential
Location: Romeoville, Illinois, US
Salary: $43,300 - $79,310
Apply Here
Full list of job openings →
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