Applico Capital founder Alex Moazed joins Augment as President of Wholesale Distribution

Initial enterprise customers include Ewing Outdoor Supply, Insco Distributing, Brooks Safety Solutions, and Reece, with over $20 billion in total distributor revenue under management

SAN FRANCISCO: Augment, the AI productivity platform for supply chain, today announced the acquisition of Merlin, a stealth AI company in wholesale distribution, and the integration of its capabilities into Augie, Augment's flagship AI teammate.

For Augment, which has raised $110M in capital, the acquisition marks the company’s entry into wholesale distribution - an industry valued at more than $8 trillion in the U.S. alone - and extends Augie's reach beyond freight brokers, shippers, and carriers into another vital link in the supply chain.

Merlin was led by distribution industry veteran and Applico Capital founder Alex Moazed. The company has been operating in stealth serving initial enterprise customers with over $20B in distributor revenue under management. Moazed joins Augment as President of Wholesale Distribution along with co-founders Nick Johnson and John Schumacher, former head of AI at Grainger.

"Distributors represent one of our most vital industries. Without them, hospitals run out of vital supplies, factories grind to a halt, and home builders can't build - yet they still run on legacy systems and spreadsheets. That changes now," said Harish Abbott, co-founder and CEO of Augment. "Alex and his team have harnessed AI to solve real business problems for distributors, and their product connects seamlessly with what Augie already does. Now Augie reaches further across the supply chain than ever before."

The Need for a Holistic AI Platform in Distribution

​​Enterprise distributors are losing margin to operational complexity driven by fragmented systems, inconsistent product language, and manual processes across multiple ERPs. The quote-to-cash process often varies within a single enterprise by geography, end-market and business unit, making standardization difficult.

Point solutions and generic AI tools don’t help. They break down in the face of the industry’s complexity and fail to scale across workflows. And they often train AI on shared, cross-customer data without giving value back to customers.

With this acquisition, Augment now offers distributors a single AI platform that adapts to each organization’s workflows through natural language rather than custom code. The platform learns how each enterprise operates, allowing organizations to adopt AI on their own terms. Customer data remains proprietary - Augie does not use it to train shared models, and all AI-learning is isolated to each enterprise.

Built with distribution-specific domain expertise, Augie is designed to handle the operational realities of the industry, including unit conversions, customer-specific SKU language, multi-ERP environments, and exception-heavy workflows.

The platform consolidates the full quote-to-cash lifecycle into a centralized hub, including:

• Quote & Sales Order Entry: Ingests quotes and orders from email, phone, text and PDF, translating customer-specific language into structured ERP entries while handling unit conversions, substitutions, and exceptions. Tasks that previously took one to two minutes per line can be completed in seconds.
• Portals and Takeoffs: Automates the monitoring of internal and external portals, translates BIM to BOM and eliminates the clutter of multiple web browser tabs that distract sales reps.
• Supplier Management: Fetches information from supplier portals, receives special pricing or quotes from manufacturers, processes returns, checks on product lead times and automates the data duplication from supplier system to distributor ERP.
• Freight and Fulfillment: Coordinates delivery and service appointments across portals, email, and phone, building on capabilities deployed across logistics environments.
• Knowledge Hub: Provides instant access to SOPs, product specifications, and internal knowledge, enabling faster and more consistent responses to customer inquiries.

“For the past decade, we’ve seen firsthand the challenges facing B2B distributors. AI is finally ready to solve them - but no provider was meeting the needs of enterprise wholesale distributors,” said Alex Moazed, now President of Wholesale Distribution at Augment. “Our top priority is putting the customer first. This industry runs on trust, and distributors rely on us not only to deliver AI automation, but to safeguard their data, one of their most valuable assets.”

Already Supporting More than $20 Billion in Combined Distributor Revenue

Augie’s new AI offering for distributors is already operational with some of the most trusted brands in the industry, including:

• Ewing Outdoor Supply, a $1B landscape distributor
• Insco Distributing, a leading, family-owned HVAC-R distributor in the South
• Brooks Safety Solutions, one of the nation's largest fire & safety distributors
• Reece, a $3.5B leader in plumbing and waterworks distribution

"Augie saves me 80% of the time spent on quoting," said Mike Mackey, Commercial Services Manager at Ewing Outdoor Supply, an initial customer. "It's as if I had my own personal assistant. It seamlessly integrates with workflows and automatically connects to my inbox and the ERP, with product search functionality that blows our ERP and website out of the water."

A Natural Extension of the Augment Platform

Wholesale distributors operate some of the largest private fleets in the country, and are among the biggest shippers of FTL and LTL freight managed by the brokers and carriers Augment already serves. Augie's core competencies - reading unstructured inputs, translating them into system actions, coordinating across people and platforms - represent AI capabilities that underpin all of its products for both logistics and distribution.

"The more of the supply chain Augie manages, the better it understands every transaction on it - where freight is coming from, why it's moving, and what happens on either end. That intelligence compounds,” said Abbott. “We're not building separate product infrastructure for separate industries. We're building one AI platform. The more of the supply chain it touches, the more valuable it gets for everyone on it."

About Augment

Augment is the AI productivity platform for supply chain. Its flagship product, Augie, is an industry-native AI teammate that works across phone, email, portals, and enterprise systems to automate complex operational workflows - supporting brokers, shippers, carriers, and distributors from quote to cash. Augment has raised $110M from Redpoint Ventures, 8VC, Applico Capital and has over 110 engineers all based in North America. Learn more and explore career opportunities at www.goaugment.com.

Fonte: Business Wire