California supply-chain company Hingeto was acquired by DiCentral, a Houston-headquartered provider of business-to-business integration-management services for an undisclosed amount.

The San Francisco Bay Area–headquartered Hingeto is an enterprise drop-ship solutions company with a client list that has included Pacific Sunwear of California, LLC. Hingeto developed a drop-shipping application that helps emerging retailers develop a supply-chain and order-management system. The app works with the Shopify platform and allows brands to deliver goods to consumers after receiving an order from a retailer who initiated the sale of an item. With this method, retailers do not have to maintain an inventory because that is managed by the brands and manufacturers.

Thuy Mai, chairman and chief executive officer of DiCentral, said that Hingeto will offer a new avenue to DiCentral clients. “The strengths of our offerings are complementary and will allow DiCentral to offer new innovative integration solutions to our combined base of clients,” Mai said. “We are also thrilled to bring on two of their employees, including their very first employee, Rebecca Regan, who’ll continue to contribute to our business.”

Hingeto co-founders Leandrew Robinson, Akintunde Ismail Maiyegun and Yaw Owusu-Barimah will continue to consult with DiCentral. In August, Robinson started a new job as general manager of Shipstation, a shipping software company. Robinson said that Hingeto would use the acquisition to help it develop further.

“DiCentral is the right company to continue the journey started five years ago at Hingeto, and we couldn't be happier with this outcome,” Robinson said in a statement. Hingeto clients also will be able to benefit from DiCentral’s electronic-data-interchange tools and suite of data connections.

Robinson also noted that retailers have developed more interest in drop shipping this year. “During our five years running Hingeto as a scrappy startup we had mixed results trying to sell the no-risk inventory model. But now, with COVID-19, the drop-ship model has skyrocketed to the top of the priority list for most retailers,” he said.

He noted that Hingeto’s gross merchandise volume, or total sales in monetary value, for Hingeto’s customers rose 400 percent between March and May of this year, Robinson said. “There is greater reliance on e-commerce as bricks-and-mortar stores have closed,” he said.