Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has run global trade for four decades, and the business model built around it has barely changed: charge companies a recurring fee to manage the complexity that no one ever bothered to engineer out of the system. “EDI has been broken for 40 years,” said Erik Kiser, Orderful founder and CEO. “Not because the problem was unsolvable, but because no one was willing to rebuild it from the ground up.”
That reality, Kiser argues, is exactly what drew Koch Disruptive Technologies to lead the company’s $35 million Series C, with continued participation from NewRoad Capital, the company announced Tuesday.
SPS Commerce, the largest publicly traded pure-play EDI company, generated $751 million in revenue in 2025, 96% of it recurring, from customers who pay annually for a full-service model in which SPS not only hosts the software but configures, maintains, and operates integrations on their behalf.
“It is also a business whose revenue depends on complexity staying unsolved, where the service fee exists because the product was never built to make the service unnecessary,” Grace Sharkey, PR and Comms manager for Orderful told FreightWaves.
This investment is a direct bet against that legacy model. Mosaic, Orderful’s AI-native EDI solution that launched in December 2025, replaces the manual mapping work that has historically consumed months of IT resources by reading each trading partner’s specification document, generating compliant guidelines and maps, and maintaining them as specifications change. What has taken the industry 3 months or more now takes less than a week. The service fee, Sharkey explained, loses its reason to exist.
“The Mosaic launch was a meaningful inflection point, one that reinforced everything we envisioned when we first partnered with the Orderful team,” said Gregoire Lehmann, partner at NewRoad Capital. “The opportunity ahead, connecting the world’s trading partners through modern infrastructure, is even larger than we anticipated, and we have full confidence they are the team to realize it.”
“When operational teams stop managing EDI around its limitations and start running it as infrastructure, the results compound fast,” explained Sharkey.
KBX Logistics, the transportation and logistics arm of Koch Industries, cut its onboarding process from 95 steps to 32 while processing millions of EDI transactions per month. Koch Disruptive Technologies, the venture arm of the same Koch Industries parent, had already seen what Orderful could do from the inside before committing capital to this round.
“KDT invests in principled entrepreneurs building technologies that improve critical systems and workflows. … We see an opportunity to leverage the broader Koch network to support the team as they scale and expand their commercial partnerships,” said Jon Chisholm, managing director at Koch Disruptive Technologies.
Other logistics providers tell the same story. Orderful told FreightWaves it has seen NFI cut onboarding time by 90%, bringing new partner setup from an average of 10 weeks down to under five days. Heartland Logistics Group reduced customer onboarding from six months to five days. Hirschbach Motor Lines went from four EDI outages in 45 days and nearly 500 lost loads under their legacy provider to zero outages after switching to Orderful, while cutting their EDI team from six people down to one.
The operational damage is not limited to companies in the logistics business. For Every Man Jack, a men’s personal care brand, the cost of staying on legacy EDI showed up in the one place that matters most to a consumer brand: the shelf.
Sharkey explained that Every Man Jack’s on-time delivery rates dropped from 97% to 80% under their previous provider. After migrating over 50 trading partners to Orderful in six months, on-time fulfillment recovered to above 95%, transaction processing dropped from up to 24 hours to seconds, and two open order management roles went unfilled after the team departed because the operation kept running without them.
Can AI save EDI?
What has always justified the managed service fee that Orderful’s model aims to demolish is the complexity sitting underneath EDI, something Orderful believes can be addressed through modern AI tools and its team of EDI experts.
Sharkey explained that for legacy providers, someone has to read the trading partner’s specification, write the mapping, and update it every time a requirement changes. Orderful’s Mosaic removed that justification. Its transformation layer is built on AI-authored code that maps between the company’s application programming interface (API) and each trading partner’s specific EDI format. When a trading partner updates their requirements, Mosaic reads the updated specification and regenerates the transformation automatically. Underneath all of it, a continuous learning system turns every correction, every error pattern and every trading partner update into a permanent network-wide improvement.
“That is what it actually means to bring AI into EDI. It’s not a faster help desk, not a smarter monitoring dashboard, but a platform that makes the service layer unnecessary in the first place,” said Sharkey.
Sharkey said the capital will fund continued technology developments, including data visibility and intelligence solutions, alongside continued investment in commercial partnerships.
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