Bristol, UK-based digital operations platform dedicated to digital retailers, Brightpearl, has raised £25M (approx €27.7M) in its Series C round of funding led by Sage – a cloud business management solution.
Sage led the round by investing around £17M (approx €18.8M) out of a total of €27.7M raised. Existing investors including Cipio Partners, Notion Capital, and Verdane also participated in this round by investing the remaining £8M (approx €8.8M). Pagemill Partners, a division of Duff & Phelps, served as the financial advisor to Brightpearl on the transaction.
With this partnership, Sage will also take a seat on its board.
Aim of this partnership and use of the raised capital
This development will enable Sage and Brightpearl to help retail and e-commerce customers take advantage of both cloud finance and retail management solutions, to support them on their digital journey.
The partnership with Brightpearl is consistent with Sage’s broader strategy to invest in complementary high growth cloud-based software applications.
Derek O’Carroll, CEO at Brightpearl, says, “We are delighted to build this new relationship with Sage to further support our retail customers and accelerate the strong presence that Sage and Brightpearl have in the UK and US. Brightpearl’s solution brings significant benefits by automating retail processes so global merchants can save time and deliver outstanding and rapid end-to-end customer experiences. This investment will allow us to expand the platform and provide even better service, increase our product innovation and our fabulous team globally.”
About Brightpearl
The company was founded in 2007 by Andrew Mulvenna and Chris Tanner. Brightpearl is a digital operations platform for retailers and wholesalers, that helps them put their orders, inventory, financials, POS, and CRM in one place. Their aim is to automate the back-office so merchants can spend their time and money growing the business.
According to Brightpearl, its complete back-office solution includes financial management, inventory and sales order management, purchasing and supplier management, CRM, fulfilment, warehouse, and logistics.
In addition, the solution also has high-performing connectors to the major ecommerce platforms, including Magento, BigCommerce, and Shopify. The company has seen the number of online firms joining its platform grow by 75 per cent in the last quarter of 2020. With more than 1,000 businesses as its clients, it claims to do about $3BN (approx €2.45B) of business a year.
About Sage
Founded in Newcastle in the year 1981 by Chad Ruff, Colin Cooper, and P. Addo-Nyarko, Sage provides small and medium-sized company business management software and services.
It claims to provide SMEs with visibility, flexibility, and efficiency to manage finances, operations, and people.
Lee Perkins, COO at Sage, says, “As retail businesses from across the globe recover from the impact of Covid-19, trading online has gone from being a ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘must-have’ for retailers. Digitising back-office operations is a critical step towards transitioning to online commerce – and through investing in high growth, cloud solutions like Brightpearl, we are committed to supporting our customers to not only make that switch quickly and easily but to also grow and compete.”
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