Problem

Distro addresses the frontline sales bottleneck in industrial wholesale distribution, particularly for HVAC/R, plumbing, and electrical distributors. These businesses face shrinking margins, labor shortages, retiring experts whose tribal knowledge is difficult to replace, growing SKU complexity, and customers who expect faster, more accurate answers. The economics are tangible: inexperienced reps take longer to ramp, senior staff spend time on repetitive lookup and quoting, and a product-selection error can create direct losses—one distributor reported absorbing an $8,000 cost after quoting the wrong furnace.

The killer use case is turning messy, technically complex customer requests—such as emails, spreadsheets, handwritten lists, RFQs, or equipment schedules—into accurate quotes quickly. Distro’s customer evidence describes quotes falling from roughly 30 minutes to five and knowledge lookups from as long as 10 minutes to minutes, allowing counter and inside-sales teams to serve more customers without sacrificing accuracy or margin.

Product / Service

Distro is an AI sales-automation and revenue platform layered onto a distributor’s existing ERP rather than a replacement for it. It processes RFQs, bid lists, purchase orders, takeoffs, bills of materials, drawings, and other sales inputs; retrieves product specifications, substitutions, pricing, and availability; generates quotes; supports customer questions; and increasingly handles order entry and accounts-payable workflows. Its integrations provide live, two-way connections with systems such as Prophet 21, Eclipse, Infor, NetSuite, Acumatica, Salesforce, SAP, and custom ERPs.

The delivery model is purpose-built and relatively hands-on: Distro’s team ingests a distributor’s approved documents and connects the platform to its ERP, while reps use a conversational interface and approve the work produced by the AI. Its agentic layer can check suppliers, fill missing product information, update ERP records, and execute transactions rather than merely suggest them. The benefit is faster quoting, fewer product and pricing errors, quicker onboarding of new hires, better margin protection, and more productive sales teams without requiring a wholesale systems overhaul.

Market

Distro competes in AI sales automation and purpose-built B2B software for industrial wholesale distribution. It sits between traditional ERPs, CRMs, e-commerce systems, and narrower point solutions, positioning itself as a unified AI revenue platform for distributor counter staff, inside sales teams, and manufacturers’ representatives. Its named competitive reference point is Canals, which Distro characterizes as primarily an order-entry and basic-quoting product; adjacent competition also includes distributors’ existing ERP/CRM workflows and specialized quoting or order-entry tools.

Distro appears to be an active commercial, seed-stage company rather than a pre-revenue prototype. Y Combinator lists it as founded in 2022, part of its Summer 2024 batch, and active. The company reports live deployments including Century HVAC and testimonials from Sanders Supply, RSC, CFM Distributors, P&H Wholesale, Weathertech Distributing, and others; a July 2026 case study says Century had processed more than 1,300 conversations and reduced RFQ turnaround by up to 83%. A third-party estimate puts 2024 ARR at $1.5 million, but Distro does not publicly disclose a verified customer count or audited revenue, so that figure should be treated as directional rather than definitive.