Slync’s IP, Tech Assets Acquired Out of Bankruptcy

Glenn Taylor
·4 min read

Slync’s supply chain technology has found a new home.

Supply chain consulting and logistics technology provider Bluspark has acquired certain assets of Slync LLC, including the firm’s software and intellectual property (IP). The deal revives the front-facing side of a business that filed for bankruptcy in October in the wake of a dramatic legal tussle with its founder, Chris Kirchner, who was later convicted of defrauding the company’s investors out of $25 million.

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Terms of the transaction were undisclosed.

In November, Slync’s board transferred the company’s IP over to the hands of a liquidator, Development Specialists Inc. (DSI), which was tasked with selling off the tech firm’s assets via an auction and using the proceeds to pay back Slync’s creditors.

At the time, DSI said it sought a buyer for Slync’s core applications, including Intelligent Carrier Management, Ocean Booking 360, Inventory in Motion and Air Freight Management.

According to Daria Kilkeary, commercial director at Bluspark, the company won the rights to Slync’s tech after a multi-month auction process.

Bluspark says it will integrate Slync’s IP in its own Voyix platform, which is designed to help importers and exporters better manage their supply chain data in one place. According to the firm, Slync will enable Bluspark to accelerate its rollout of advanced features in Voyix, which is designed to streamline logistics processes, including rate management, shipment bookings allocation and visibility and rate audit and payment.

Kilkeary told Sourcing Journal the Slync integration was a current “work in process.”

The Slync logistics orchestration technology was built to bolster workflow across the supply chain, marrying data across systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and transportation management services, as well as integrating emails, PDFs and spreadsheets.

Customers could use Slync to automate back-end logistics functions, such as documentation, invoicing and carrier management—all in an effort to improve productivity and service-level reliability.

“The storied demise of Slync should not overshadow the great work the development and product team did to bring innovative solutions using the latest in AI and machine learning to their customers,” said Ken O’Brien, president and CEO of Bluspark, in a statement. “As a former potential customer, we saw the value of leveraging the technology stack to bring the vast amounts of unstructured data this industry generates into an actionable, automated state in a structured cloud environment.”

O’Brien emphasized that Bluspark saw the acquisition as a “great opportunity” to incorporate the tech stack into the Voyix solution.

“We always appreciate accretive opportunities—this is one such opportunity,” O’Brien said.

Bluspark’s head of technology, Nilanjan Mitra, said the addition of the Slync IP into its existing product suite will bring new functionality to the consulting firm’s shipper association and beneficial cargo owner (BCO) customers, all while opening up new product offerings and market segments.

“It positions us to tap into new target markets, leveraging predictive analytics to offer unparalleled solutions in the logistics field,” Mitra said. “This was a natural pairing of decades of experience and our existing technology to advance the logistics and shipping industries digitization efforts.”

Bluspark works with shippers’ associations and trade associations in helping importers and exporters source reliable transportation services and manage the complexities of international trade and global supply chains.

The integration of Slync into Bluspark comes shortly after a more popular freight tech got saved from obsolescence. Convoy, the digital trucking brokerage that ceased operations in October just 18 months out of a $3.8 billion valuation, was able to be revived in February, months after Flexport acquired the company’s technology stack.

Although Convoy didn’t have the founder-induced issues that Slync had, in which the latter’s former CEO had been accused of using the firm as a “personal piggy bank,” both companies shared common financial struggles amid a wider freight recession.

In particular, neither tech company was making a profit. While neither company disclosed income figures, the bankruptcy filing for Slync revealed it endured four straight years of net income declines on a paltry combined revenue of $1.7 million.

And as the companies struggled to make money, the venture funding that had initially helped prop the businesses up had withered away amid a higher-interest rate environment, preventing the businesses from having quick access to capital that they had in 2021 and 2022.