Sage and Brightpearl to Form Strategic Partnership

We were excited today to see the strategic relationship evolve between our two partners Brightpearl and Sage Intacct. APIWORX has been a partner of both organizations now for some time. We believe in the ability of both companies to service our mutual customer base. APIWORX already offers dedicated integration products for Brightpearl and Sage Intacct. We are excited to see how this new partnership evolves our relationship and our ability to support our customers even more effectively!

Under the partnership, Sage will make a minority investment of approximately £17 million ($23m) into the business. The company will take a seat on Brightpearl’s board. Together, Sage and Brightpearl will help retail and e-commerce customers take advantage of best-of-breed cloud finance and retail management solutions. Furthermore, both aim to support businesses on their digital journey.

Strategic Partnership

The partnership with Brightpearl is consistent with Sage’s broader strategy to invest in complementary high-growth cloud-based software applications.

With its global headquarters in Bristol, UK, and the US headquarters in Austin, Texas, Brightpearl helps 1,000 retail customers. The company aids to streamline and automate these businesses’ retail operations. That is across order management, CRM, fulfillment, retail accounting inventory, and warehouse management as they scale and grow. The company has partnerships with organizations like Shopify, eBay, and Amazon. It has seen the number of online firms joining its platform grow by 75% in the last quarter of 2020.

Lee Perkins, Chief Operations Officer at Sage, said: “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. Digitizing 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”.

Derek O’Carroll, the CEO of Brightpearl shared: “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.”

Moving Forward

Sage led the round investing approximately £17 million ($23m). It was the amount out of a total of £25 million ($33m) in this Series C round. Existing shareholders including Cipio Partners, Notion Capital, and Verdane investing a further £8 million ($10m). Pagemill Partners, a division of Duff & Phelps, served as the financial advisor to Brightpearl on the transaction.