Sage and Brightpearl announce partnership to accelerate digital transformation for retail customers 

At a time of transformation for the retail sector, the partnership will offer customers best-of-breed business and retail management solutions

London, UK – Sage, a market leader in cloud business management solutions, today 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.

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, fulfilment, retail accounting inventory, and warehouse management as they scale and grow. The company, which has partnerships with organisations 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. 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”.

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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About Sage 

Sage is the global market leader for technology that provides small and medium businesses with the visibility, flexibility and efficiency to manage finances, operations and people. With our partners, Sage is trusted by millions of customers worldwide to deliver the best cloud technology and support. Our years of experience mean that our colleagues and partners understand how to serve our customers and communities through the good, and more challenging times. We are here to help, with practical advice, solutions, expertise and insight.

About Brightpearl 

Brightpearl is a Digital Operations Platform for retailers and wholesalers. Our mission is clear: automate the back office so merchants can spend their time and money growing the business.

Brightpearl’s 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 has high-performing connectors to the major ecommerce platforms, including Magento, BigCommerce and Shopify. 1,000 businesses in 26 countries use our platform. We manage over 10m transactions and $3bn of business a year.