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About — Brunel Momentum

We're rebuilding the last mile so the best brand wins — not just the biggest.

Brunel Momentum is building delivery infrastructure for Canadian DTC ecommerce — for the brands whose customers compare every package to Amazon's, and who deserve the infrastructure to compete on equal terms. Founded in the GTA. Operated by people who've spent their careers inside the supply chains that set the bar.

The namesake
Why we picked the name

Isambard Kingdom Brunel didn't build novelties. He built infrastructure.

The Great Western Railway. The Clifton Suspension Bridge. The SS Great Britain. These weren't products with a launch and a sunset; they were the arteries Britain's industrial economy ran on for the next hundred years. Brunel built the kind of thing that's still doing useful work generations after the engineer who designed it has been forgotten.

That's the bar. We picked the name to remind ourselves of it. Ecommerce delivery in Canada needs infrastructure, not novelty. Networks that bend with seasonal volume, hold their unit economics under stress, and outlast the founders who built them. That's what we're working on. We're not chasing the next funding cycle — we're building the kind of thing that's still here a century from now.

The founder
Why I built this — Rahul Khanna

Thirteen years across four supply chains. The same problem in every one.

Rahul Khanna, Founder & CEO of Brunel Momentum
Rahul Khanna
Founder & CEO
I've spent my career inside the operations functions of Walmart Canada, Amazon's Supply Chain Optimization Technologies group, Staples Canada, and SSENSE. Different price points. Different customers. Different scales. The same problem under all of them — how to deliver faster and cheaper. The same answer kept showing up.
/ 01 Walmart Canada

At Walmart Canada I led the launch of the online grocery program across 400 stores — turning every retail location into a fulfillment node — and helped scale the ship-from-store program that pushed ecommerce volume through the existing physical network. That work taught me what a high-functioning physical supply chain looks like at scale, and where its physics begin to break the moment you ask it to deliver to individual doorsteps instead of stores. Mass retail is designed for pallets and aisles. Stretching that system to deliver parcels to porches works for a while, but the unit economics fight you the entire way. The whole system bends slowly, because it was built to.

/ 02 Amazon SCOT

Amazon's Supply Chain Optimization Technologies group is the team that wrote the playbook for Prime-speed delivery. I sat inside it. Every decision in that organization — network design, labor scheduling, pick path optimization, inbound routing — flowed from a single design constraint: what is the latest a customer can place an order and still get it next day? Move that variable by an hour and the entire economic model shifts. Move it by three hours and a different system becomes possible. That question reframed how I thought about every part of the supply chain afterward, and it's the question this company is built to answer for everyone who isn't Amazon.

"Move that variable by an hour and the entire economic model shifts."
/ 03 Staples Canada

At Staples Canada I ran the ecommerce technology stack for a mid-market business — a real Canadian retailer with national reach but without Amazon's scale, capital, or proprietary delivery network. Living that gap firsthand made the asymmetry concrete. Every DTC brand in Canada is competing against Amazon's delivery experience without access to Amazon's infrastructure. The carriers available to mid-volume merchants weren't designed for ecommerce of this shape. They were built for B2B parcel volume — one big pickup, one big sort, one route per driver per day. The economics of Prime-equivalent delivery don't fit on top of that machine.

/ 04 SSENSE

At SSENSE I saw something that reshaped how I think about logistics. The company had invested in serious warehouse automation — but the lesson wasn't the hardware itself. It was watching what happens when good hardware automation, the right software stack, well-designed operational processes, and the right people all combine in production. That's what generates real speed to market. Hardware on its own gives you expensive paperweights. Software on its own gives you good dashboards over bad operations. The advantage compounds only when all four pieces are designed together — and that combination is the design template for everything we're building at Brunel.

/ 05 The pattern

Across all four roles, the answer kept arriving at the same place. Middle-mile sortation is the lever. The cutoff time you can promise a customer, the first-attempt delivery rate you can achieve, the cost per parcel you can sustain at scale — every one of those numbers traces back to how parcels move through the sort. Carriers built for B2B parcel volume can't bend that lever; they were never designed to. So we're building the infrastructure that can. That's the whole project.

What we believe
Values

Four ideas we keep coming back to when the work gets hard.

Most operating values get written once and ignored. We try to use these as actual decision filters — when there's a real tradeoff, these are what we ask each other.

/ 01
First principles thinking.

Every inherited assumption gets re-derived. Why does the cutoff have to be 4pm? Why is 80% first-attempt the industry standard? Why does pickup happen in the morning? When you stop accepting answers passed down from B2B parcel networks, the constraints loosen and a different system becomes possible. Most of the interesting design choices in this company started with someone refusing the conventional answer.

/ 02
We build what we'd use.

This isn't shipping infrastructure for someone else's ecommerce business. It's the carrier we wish had existed when we ran ecommerce ourselves — at Walmart, Amazon, Staples, and SSENSE. Every product decision, from the merchant dashboard to the driver app to the cutoff promise, passes through that filter. If we wouldn't have wanted to use it, it doesn't ship.

/ 03
Operators, not optimizers.

We design systems with the lens of day-to-day operations — not as elegant simulations, and not as technically clever projects. Real operations need flexibility, because reality doesn't follow the spec. Trucks run late. Volume spikes overnight. A driver calls in sick on the busiest day of the year. The systems that hold up under that are the ones designed by people who've actually worked the floor and know what flexibility has to look like in the moment.

/ 04
The end customer is the customer.

Our merchant pays the invoice. But our merchant's customer judges the brand. Every decision we make — cutoff time, first-attempt rate, photo-proof quality, driver behaviour at the door — gets weighed against what the recipient actually experiences. That's the relationship our merchants are protecting, and we treat it as ours to protect too.

How we operate
Operating principles

Values are the philosophy. These are how it hits the floor.

/ 01
Density before geography.

We earn coverage by being excellent in one corridor before adding the next. Greater Toronto Area first. Every other expansion has to clear that bar — proven economics, proven service, proven team — before we plant the flag.

/ 02
Unit economics from day one.

We don't subsidize delivery on the way to scale. The numbers either work at fifty parcels a day or they never work. Growing a broken model larger only enlarges the problem. We've watched too many logistics companies learn that the hard way.

/ 03
Build, then run.

We design the system, then operate it ourselves. The merchant dashboard, the driver app, the sort floor, the routing — we live with the consequences of every choice. That's the only feedback loop tight enough to matter.

The team
Who's building this

A small founding team in the GTA, building for operators like ourselves.

Brunel Momentum is led by Rahul Khanna, founder and CEO, with a small founding team across operations, engineering, and merchant success. We're hiring people who have moved real volume — not consultants, not optimizers from the outside. People who know what it feels like when the truck doesn't show up, the sort runs late, or a customer's package goes missing on a Friday afternoon.

If that sounds like you, or if you're a Canadian DTC merchant looking for a carrier that will actually pick up the phone, we'd like to hear from you.

Brunel built things that were still standing
a century after he was.

That's the bar. Not the headline launch. Not the pretty deck. The infrastructure that's still doing useful work long after the founders have moved on. That's what we're building toward — one corridor, one sort centre, one merchant at a time.

Talk to us
Or email directly: info@brunelmomentum.ai