After Fraud Charges Against Slync’s Ex-CEO, Goldman Sachs Doubles Down With $24 Million Investment

Last summer, a little-known logistics software company called Slync was facing bankruptcy after its CEO drained its bank accounts to fund a lavish lifestyle, complete with a private jet and a fleet of luxury cars. As employees went without pay for more than two months, the board and investors like Goldman Sachs ignored concerns of wrongdoing raised by executives.

Now, a week after the former CEO, Chris Kirchner, was indicted on fraud charges by multiple federal agencies, Goldman Sachs is leading a $24 million funding round into Slync in the hope the company’s underlying software can reverse its fortunes, and its reputation.

“We're taking the company all the way back to restart,” John Urban, Slync’s new CEO, told Forbes. “It's absolutely a double down for our investors, because a lot of the money that they've invested in the past is gone.”

Urban, who joined Slync in 2018 as an advisor to Kirchner during the company’s series A funding round, before returning in August as CEO after Kirchner was fired, conceded that investors had not acted on concerns about Kirchner’s misconduct, or established effective corporate governance controls.

But after Kirchner’s departure, he said, Slync’s employees had “sat down with Goldman and the rest of the board and said, ‘you haven't been listening to us in the past. Let us tell you what we think we can do with this company,’” Urban said. “And it was pretty impressive.”

Urban said the new funding was validation of Slync’s underlying product, despite years of mismanagement under the previous CEO. He added that the capital would be used to ramp up sales, hire new employees, pay off contractual obligations, and continue to develop the company’s product, which provides software for large logistics companies to streamline and automate processes and tasks such as tracking shipments.

Goldman Sachs would not make the partner who led the deal, Darren Cohen, available for an interview. In a press statement, Cohen said the value of Slync’s technology “is significant in our opinion.” Other investors in the new funding round include Blumberg Capital, ACME Capital, and over a dozen individuals.

The funding announcement comes a week after Kirchner was arrested at his Texas mansion last week by FBI agents, Forbes reported. The 35-year-old was later indicted on fraud charges by the Justice Department, and alleged to have fraudulently sold $67 million of securities, according to a separate claim brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Kirchner’s indictment was “kind of cathartic,” Urban said, “because for the first time we could all kind of exhale and say, ‘Okay, this is the end of that chapter.’”

When Forbes tried to reach Kirchner for comment, it appeared his cell phone had been disconnected.

Kirchner, who had worked at Best Buy and a label making company before launching Slync in 2017 with a team of engineers from Salesforce, was considered an effective salesman, and raised $80 million for Slync in two funding rounds led by Goldman Sachs and Blumberg Capital.

But Slync went through multiple periods of not paying employees and left vendors unpaid. After Goldman Sachs led a $60 million funding round in 2021, Kirchner signed multi-million dollar sports sponsorships. At the same time, Kirchner would not allow other executives, including the CFO to communicate with the board, and vastly overstated the company’s revenue, according to a previous Forbes report.

In one episode documented by the Justice Department, Kirchner told an executive to move $20 million from Slync’s bank accounts to one that he controlled — funding that he later used to purchase a $16 million private jet. “Whenever there's large sums of money,” Urban said, “you're gonna attract people who are occasionally sociopathic people, who are not there for the good of the company or the employees.”

Slync did not lose customers as a result of the events of last year, according to Urban; last year DHL and Kuehne + Nagel were reported as customers. He added that the company has been generating revenue, though he would not say how much. Urban said a “small portion” of the new funding will be used to pay off contractual obligations Slync had with sports teams, organizations and individuals that were signed under Kirchner’s direction.

Urban said he had no plans to rebrand the company — something he estimates would cost $2 million in marketing — and instead saw an opportunity to stake Slync’s name as a comeback story. “Remember that crap that they went through, boy they've come a long way,” Urban said. “That's the kind of story we can create.”