As financial markets melted in 2008, two friends who had met as Morgan Stanley analyst trainees jumped into cold storage. They wanted to buy and build a company “to own forever.” Starting with a single warehouse in Seattle, they named their firm Lineage.
Today, a bar chart of its growth looks like the east face of Mount Everest, with temperature-controlled space reaching 3 billion cubic feet in 2023 (2.1 billion in the U.S. and Canada, and .9 billion elsewhere). That’s roughly equivalent to 81 refrigerated Empire State Buildings.
On its website, Lineage refers to itself as a temperature-controlled warehousing REIT, but its services also include logistics such as transportation, packing, picking, and international customs brokering. Their first outside hire, in 2013, was a chief information officer, which brought an intense focus on technology.
Rapid scaling allowed the business to invest heavily in automation such as self-driving forklifts, in a mission to eliminate waste whereby they solved problems both on the road (filling transportation “deadhead,” or empty trailers traveling between destinations), and in the warehouse (where data-driven systems sped up receiving and retrieval and let customers track pallets online).
Lineage’s recent IPO on Nasdaq (stock symbol: LINE) raised $4.4 billion and generated a valuation north of $18 billion, making it the largest IPO in the U.S. so far this year.