Bristol founded Brightpearl raises $15m
Brightpearl, an enterprise resource planning company, has raised $15m in growth funding.
Founded in Bristol in 2007, Brightpearl’s round was led by Cipio Partners, who join existing investors MMC Ventures (invested in 2014) and Notion Capital.
Brightpearl claims to serve more than 1,000 brands to transact, it claims, more than $1.8bn worth of trade across 26 different countries.
The business claims to have seen a 77% increase in year-on-year new business growth and delivered 34% in revenue growth over the past year.
Derek O’Carroll, the company’s CEO, said Brightpearl’s mission was to deliver intelligent retail. He added:
“We’ve experienced tremendous growth over the last year because of our ability to service the need from fast-growing brands for a solution that automates their operational processes and supports real-time decision making, which is absolutely vital in today’s culture of immediacy for retailers and wholesalers.”
“It’s a real credit to the Brightpearl team and the support of our customers that we have secured investment from a leading European technology investment firm. We plan to invest these funds into expanding our service and introducing machine learning capabilities to give our customers even more value when making business decisions.”
Roland Dennert, a managing partner at Cipio Partners, explained why he decided to invest: “A big reason why Brightpearl’s retail ERP platform is catching on fast is that it provides multichannel retailers with a step-change improvement in ERP implementation time while being on feature parity or better for the targeted market than much more complex ERP solutions.”
Alongside the funding announcement, Brightpearl has also appointed Maurice Helfgott as chairman – the former Marks & Spencer main board director.
Helfgott is also the founder of Amery Capital, an investment and advisory firm focused on retail and digital consumer businesses.
Helfgott added: “After years of intensive high-quality tech development, Brightpearl have produced an excellent and capable platform, growing rapidly under impressive leadership. The next step is introducing real-time machine learning data into the platform, so our customers are able to make more informed decisions — that’s hugely valuable in the current retail climate.
“Retail and wholesale are in a stage of transformation and reinvention and there is a huge opportunity in this sector. I know from experience that automating the back office to work efficiently is now a major priority for merchants. Brightpearl has purpose built an ERP solution that’s designed specifically for retailers and wholesalers to take back control of their business and generate significant operational gains,” he concluded.