Sage, a market leader in cloud business management solutions, announced a significant partnership with Brightpearl, a market leading Digital Operations Platform targeted at digital retailers across the globe.

Under the partnership, Sage will make a minority investment of approximately £17 million ($23m) into the business and 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, supporting them on their digital journey.

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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 to streamline and automate their retail operations across order management, CRM, fulfillment, retail accounting inventory, and warehouse management as they scale and grow. The company, which has partnerships with organizations like Shopify, eBay and Amazon, 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”.

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Derek O’Carroll, CEO, Brightpearl, said: “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.”

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

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