Augment has expanded into the $8T wholesale distribution industry with our acquisition of Merlin, a stealth AI company serving enterprise distributors. With the acquisition, Merlin's founder Alex Moazed is joining us as President of Wholesale Distribution, along with his incredible team.

Augie already supports distributors who collectively do over $20 billion in topline revenue, including customers like Ewing Outdoor Supply, Insco Distributing, Brooks Safety Solutions, and Reece.

But this story doesn't start with a deal. It starts with a question I kept hearing.

The Question We Could No Longer Avoid

Every time I'd talk to a freight broker or carrier using Augie, the conversation would drift in the same direction: "Our biggest customers are distributors. Do you work with them?"

We didn't. And the more I learned, the clearer the opportunity became.

Distributors move medical supplies, HVAC components, industrial pipe, building materials – and just about everything else that makes our economy work. For so many vital sectors of our economy, distributors are the supply chain.

And they are drowning in operational complexity that no one has solved yet.

A single enterprise distributor might run six different ERPs across its business units. Every customer has their own product language — their own part numbers, their own unit conventions, their own exceptions. A quote can take two minutes per line, multiplied across thousands of lines a day, multiplied across a national sales force. The work is relentless, manual, and ripe for AI — but every tool we knew of either broke down at the industry's complexity or forced distributors to share their data to train models that benefited everyone else.

Neither was acceptable.

Why This Makes Augie Better for Everyone

Wholesale distributors run some of the largest private fleets in the country. They're among the biggest shippers of FTL and LTL freight — which means they're already customers and counterparties of the brokers and carriers Augie serves today.

As we onboard distributors onto Augie, that means more direct opportunities for new business for the brokers and carriers on our platform — and easier ways to win and manage it.

We're not building a separate AI product for a separate industry. We're building one AI productivity platform for the supply chain. Every new part of the supply chain Augie reaches makes the whole thing more valuable for everyone on it.

And to be clear: our investment in freight isn't changing. We're continuing to go deep on the use cases that matter most to brokers, managed transportation providers, and carriers. That work isn't slowing down. It's accelerating.

Why Alex and Team

Alex Moazed has been living inside the distribution problem for a decade. Through Applico Capital, he's worked closely with some of the largest distributors in the country, understanding at a deep level where the operational pain is and why previous solutions haven't stuck.

When I first saw what his team had built, two things stood out.

First: the depth of the domain expertise. Augie is good at reading unstructured inputs and translating them into system actions — that's what we've always done for logistics. But distribution has its own language. Unit conversions, BIM-to-BOM translation, customer-specific SKU mapping, multi-ERP routing. Alex's team had built for all of it. The product understood the industry at a level that would have taken us years to replicate.

Second: the data philosophy. The team built on a principle we share completely — customer data stays with the customer. Augie doesn't use what it learns from one enterprise to train models for another. Every customer's AI is isolated to their own environment. In an industry built on trust and long-term relationships, that's not a nice-to-have. It's the whole thing.

Joining Alex are his co-founders Nick Johnson and John Schumacher, formerly head of AI at Grainger. These are people who have spent their careers in this industry. That matters more than any technical spec.

What Augie Does for Distributors Now

Here's what Augie looks like in practice for distributors:

• A sales rep gets an order via email — a customer's part numbers, their unit conventions, a few exceptions mixed in. Today, entering that order takes one to two minutes per line, or more. Augie reads the order, translates it, matches the customer request to the distributor’s SKUs, and routes it into the ERP in seconds. The rep moves on.

• A sales manager wants to know a customer's lead time on a specific product. Instead of tabbing between a supplier portal, an email thread, and the ERP, they ask Augie. It fetches the answer.

• A new hire needs to know how to handle a return exception. Instead of hunting down the one person who knows, they ask Augie. The institutional knowledge is there.

The full distributor quote-to-cash workflow — order entry, portal monitoring, supplier management, freight coordination, knowledge retrieval — powered by AI, tailored to how each distributor actually operates.

Built on Trust

When Alex and I first talked seriously about this, he said something that stuck with me: "The distribution industry runs on trust."

He's right. And the way we're building — with data isolation, with domain expertise, with people who have spent their careers earning that trust — is how we intend to honor it.

We're building one AI productivity platform for the supply chain. Distribution is the next step. It won't be the last.