Like someone’s favorite pair of jeans, NYC-based Denim hopes to be a reliable, flexible and easy-to-use solution. Serving logistics businesses, the newly rebranded company develops financial enablement tech with the goal of making freight shipment payments easier and more trustworthy. It is now building out its product with a fresh injection of capital.
“Denim embodies who we are as a team and what we want to achieve in the freight and logistics industry — to be a reliable, essential and universal partner to our clients,” Shawn Vo, Denim’s CTO and co-founder, said in a statement.
Previously named Axle Payments, Denim announced its rebrand alongside its Series B funding round. The company pulled in a $126 million round led by Pelion Venture Partners. The sum consists of $26 million in equity capital and $100 million in debt financing.
With the goal of strengthening the supply chain, Denim equips freight brokerages with financial products, operations tools and automation capabilities. Its tech allows clients to simplify their financing operations and easily access the working capital they need to grow their business.
“The core challenge our clients face is adapting to the pressures of an increasingly complex and unpredictable supply chain. Freight brokers — and the shippers and carriers they work with — must find ways to evolve how they do business together with smarter tools,” Bharath Krishnamoorthy, Denim’s CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “Denim is pioneering the financial enablement market to meet this challenge. ... We’ll continue to scale and serve our clients while strengthening our position as a payments ecosystem that powers the supply chain.”
Based on the company’s recent growth, Denim has served its customers well. The company quadrupled its revenue in 2021, according to a release. So far this year, Denim’s platform has facilitated almost 60,000 jobs between shippers, carriers and freight brokers, according to the company. It also grew the size of its team by 200 percent so far this year and is still actively hiring.
“In the last year, our business has evolved and grown dramatically, including enhancements to our platform that help our clients optimize their financial decisions and considerable additions to our teams,” Vo said.
One of its latest enhancements is its recently launched Business Performance Dashboard product. The solution helps its clients make payment requests more efficiently and gather projections of their overall business health. Denim’s new equity capital will help it scale its platform even further. The debt financing will help provide working capital to freight brokerages.
Denim’s upcoming product expansion plans will add flexible financing and automation tools to its offering. By automating invoicing, collections and payments, the company aims to help brokerages reduce their daily payments and collections tasks by 75 percent.
As these products are in the works, Denim is expanding its team. A portion of its new funding will go toward scaling its headcount.
