A five-person startup emerging from Y Combinator claims it has cracked one of online retail's persistent headaches: the jumble of software tools merchants juggle to handle returns, shipping, and customer complaints.
Pango, co-founded by serial e-commerce entrepreneur Steve Rahimi, pitches what it calls an "agentic operating system" where store owners describe their logistics policies in everyday language and artificial intelligence executes the grunt work. The company says it has signed 30 brands, though those figures come from the startup's own marketing materials and haven't been independently verified.
The premise is straightforward enough. Most online retailers patch together five to seven separate platforms for order tracking, return management, carrier coordination, and help-desk support. Pango's software consolidates that sprawl into a single interface. A merchant might type, "Customers in France pay their own return shipping; U.S. orders over $100 get free exchanges; anything under $20 qualifies for a returnless refund." The system then translates those instructions into automated workflows, only escalating exceptions that require human judgment.
Whether that vision holds up under real-world pressure remains to be seen. The startup spent a year embedded with 30 e-commerce brands to build the product, according to Rahimi, and launched its Shopify app in late 2024. Early user reviews have been positive, with five merchants awarding it a perfect rating on the Shopify App Store between January and April 2026.
A Bet on Natural Language as Infrastructure
Rahimi, who has been building online stores since age 17, co-founded the company with Lukasz Reszczynski, a developer who previously created a patented product configurator that handled over $1.5 billion in quotes for manufacturing clients. Reszczynski holds a master's in astrophysics and dropped out of a molecular biology PhD to launch Pango. The team operates between New York and Stockholm.
Their central bet is that merchants are tired of writing code or clicking through endless settings menus to manage logistics. Instead of configuring rules through dropdown menus and conditional logic trees, Pango's customers describe what they want in plain sentences. The AI compiles those policies into what the company calls autonomous agents.
The platform handles multi-carrier orchestration, branded tracking pages, instant exchanges, store credit incentives, automated label generation, and pick-and-pack fulfillment. It integrates with more than 100 carriers and software systems, including DHL, UPS, FedEx, Shopify, Magento, Gorgias, Zendesk, and Klaviyo. Ongoing WMS, a warehouse-management provider, confirmed in a LinkedIn post that its Pango integration went live with underwear brand Understatement, automatically creating return orders in the warehouse system.
Josefin Beijer, head of customer experience at Understatement Underwear, said in a testimonial on Pango's site that the platform "streamlines deliveries and returns, empowering customers to effortlessly select their preferred shipping option." Jose Peiró, chief operating officer at footwear brand Kukinos, added that Pango "transforms returns from a black box into a manageable solution."
Customer testimonials are one thing. Sustained adoption at scale is another, and Pango is still in the early stages of proving its thesis. The company offers a free tier that includes returns software and domestic U.S. and Canada return labels, with paid plans scaling by order volume and feature set. Merchants can roll out modules incrementally, starting with tracking before layering on returns and shipping automation.
Crowded Field, Familiar Promises
Pango is entering a market already populated by established players. Loop Returns markets AI-driven returns automation under a similar product name, Checkout+. AfterShip offers unified tracking and returns. Narvar, Happy Returns (owned by UPS), and ReturnGO all compete in the same space, with ReturnGO integrating with Shopify's returns API last May.
The startup has backing from HEARTFELT VC, SSE Business Lab, Wave Ventures, Karaoke Club, and several angels with e-commerce credentials, including Johan Licke von Sydow, Marc Verschueren, and Anders Signell. Pango declined to disclose the funding amount when it announced investors in February of last year. The company exhibited at eTail Boston in August and claims to operate in 40 countries, though the actual distribution of those customers is unclear.
Y Combinator highlighted the startup in a promotional post with bold efficiency claims. That sort of promise is the standard fare of every logistics automation vendor; the question is whether Pango's natural-language interface makes the technology accessible enough to win over merchants who have grown skeptical of overblown software pitches.
For now, the company appears to be gaining traction with mid-sized direct-to-consumer brands in fashion and lifestyle categories. Whether it can expand beyond that niche and compete with incumbents that have deeper integrations and larger customer bases will depend on execution. In e-commerce logistics, the difference between a clever demo and a reliable workhorse often emerges only after tens of thousands of orders have passed through the system.
