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Augment Expands Into Wholesale Distribution With Merlin Deal
Merlin Technology Will Integrate Into Augie, Augment’s Flagship AI Platform
Seeking greater visibility into how freight is generated and fulfilled, Augment has acquired Merlin, an artificial intelligence startup focused on wholesale distribution, and will integrate its technology into Augie, the company’s flagship AI platform.
The acquisition expands Augment’s reach beyond freight brokers, shippers and carriers into wholesale distribution, a sector that operates large private fleets and ships significant volumes of full truckload and less-than-truckload freight. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Augment has raised $110 million in capital and said the deal extends its AI platform deeper into the supply chain by connecting commercial workflows with logistics execution. Wholesale distribution represents an industry valued at more than $8 trillion in the U.S., according to the company.
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Moazed
Merlin had been operating in stealth, serving enterprise distributors representing more than $20 billion in revenue under management. Founder Alex Moazed, a distribution industry executive and founder of Applico Capital, joins Augment as president of wholesale distribution, along with Merlin co-founders Nick Johnson and John Schumacher, formerly head of AI at Grainger.
“Distributors represent one of our most vital industries,” Augment co-founder and CEO Harish Abbott said. “Without them, hospitals run out of vital supplies, factories grind to a halt and homebuilders can’t build — yet they still run on legacy systems and spreadsheets. That changes now.”
Augment said distributors often operate across fragmented systems and multiple enterprise resource planning platforms, contributing to operational complexity and slower order fulfillment. The company said its Augie platform is designed to translate unstructured inputs — including emails, PDFs and phone orders — into structured system actions across the quote-to-cash life cycle, including order entry, supplier interactions and freight coordination.
Customer data remains proprietary and is not used to train shared AI models, the company said, with AI learning isolated within each enterprise.
“AI is finally ready to solve them — but no provider was meeting the needs of enterprise wholesale distributors,” Moazed said. “This industry runs on trust, and distributors rely on us not only to deliver AI automation, but to safeguard their data.”
Augment said the expanded platform is already in use at distributors including Ewing Outdoor Supply, Insco Distributing, Brooks Safety Solutions and Reece.
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