Relex, a Finnish startup that provides software for retail planning,has announced that it has raised a whopping $200 million minority investment from growth-stage investor TCV. For those who are not aware, TCV is one of the largest providers of capital to growth-stage private and public companies in the technology industry and has backed industry-leading companies, including Airbnb, Facebook, Netflix, Splunk, Spotify, WorldRemit and Zillow.
Found in 2005, the Helenski-based tech startup provides an end-to-end retail planning solution enabling companies to improve their competitiveness through accurate forecasting and replenishment, localised assortments, profitable use of space and optimized workforce planning.
Further, the company has consistently achieved 50 percent year on year growth and attracted leading brands across the globe including Coop Denmark, Franprix, MediaMarkt, Morrisons, PartyCity, Rossmann, and WHSmith.
How the funding will be utilised?
Relex will use the funding to continue to fuel its successful growth. The company’s three founders, Mikko Kärkkäinen, Johanna Småros and Michael Falck, see the additional funding as a means of fulfilling their vision of changing the world of retail planning.
The founders will stay in their senior management roles, remain significant shareholders and will continue to set the strategy and direction for the Company. RELEX’s existing investor Summit Partners will retain an equity stake in the business and will continue to hold a seat on the RELEX board of directors.
Also, the company plans to use improve product development, hire more tech talent and further expand its retail-specific machine learning and AI capabilities. They also aim to tackle the difficulty of food wastage in developed countries.
“The development of retail and supply chain planning has been held back by siloed organisations and limitations in how technologies integrate,” comments RELEX’s CEO Mikko Kärkkäinen. “Our vision is to change how the field works by driving a more responsive unified planning process. We are already off to a good start — now we will increase our speed by accelerating our product development ambitions, hiring more tech talent and investing further into the development of our organisation as well as further expanding our retail-specific machine learning and AI capabilities that complement our core data processing platform.”
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