The founder and former CEO of supply chain management software company Slync was sentenced Thursday to 20 years in federal prison.
Christopher Kirchner, 37, was arrested in February 2023 after he had been ousted as CEO of Slync the summer before. He was convicted in January on four counts of wire fraud and seven counts of money laundering, defrauding investors out of at least $25 million.
Kirchner was also ordered to pay more than $65 million in restitution, the U.S. attorney’s office said in a news release.
Christopher Weinbel, a federal public defender representing Kirchner, said via email Sunday that Kirchner plans to appeal.
Slync, based in Southlake, was once valued at $240 million. It began to struggle when Kirchner started using company funds for personal use, including buying a $16 million private jet.
“Even as his company was circling the drain, Chris Kirchner was spending millions of his investors’ money on himself,” said U.S. Attorney Leigha Simonton. “Apparently, projecting personal prosperity was more important to him than making payroll.”
From April 2020 to March 2022, Kirchner initiated over 100 wire transfers from the company’s account with Silicon Valley Bank to another company account that only he had access to, later sending much of that money to his personal accounts, the news release said. Once an employee reported Kirchner to the board and he was suspended, he removed privileges for other employees to stop them from accessing the computer system and attempted to delete 18 gigabytes of data, the release said.
Slync turned to bankruptcy court in October 2023. The company said at the time that Kirchner’s lawsuit to force it to pay his legal fees was part of the reason it needed to liquidate.
