Enterprise Platform Brightpearl Raises $10M In Round Led By MMC Ventures

The advantage with enterprise startups if that they can be based just about anywhere. And that’s proved today with the news that Brightpearl, which a cloud-based business management system aimed at small to mid sized multi-channel retailers, has raised another $10m. The round led my MMC Ventures with participation from Quayle Munro and existing investors Eden Ventures and Notion Capital. That bring its total funding to date to around $24 million after previous funding rounds, including $8 million last year, and $5 million in 2011. This latest round will be used to accelerate investment in product and sales expansion.

Brightpearl claims its revenue is doubling year over year. And since 2011, the platform has processed over $1.3 billion in gross merchandise value.

The company operates out of San Francisco, and the UK’s own “Wild West” – otherwise known as Bristol – with 88 employees in total. Its cloud-based multi-channel retail management system integrates orders, inventory, accounting, reporting and customer data.

Competitors include NetSuite and Erply, among others.

Salman Malik, chief executive officer of Brightpearl says the company is at an inflection point: “Our business has been doubling; with more than 1,300 retailers on our platform, we’ve developed a deep understanding of customer needs, have a clear vision for platform enhancements and a strategy in place for optimizing our go-to-market initiatives.”

Brightpearl is now fully integrated with a variety of sales channels including Magento, eBay, Bigcommerce, Shopify and Amazon.

The company has a pretty good founding story. Founders Chris Tanner and Andrew Mulvenna became friends as university undergraduates and founded a skateboard company called Lush Longboards in Chris’s basement. After university, Chris expanded Lush Longboards to become the 3rd largest long skateboard company globally; Andrew joined a global IT company where his roles included Venue Technology Manager for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games.

As an entrepreneur trying to expand Lush, Chris was frustrated by the expense and limited functionality offered by business software, like Sage and Netsuite. Lacking the budget to buy an expensive IT system but possessing programming skills, Chris started to build Brightpearl.

Chris spent 2006-7 developing the platform. After it wonn clients, he sold Lush brought his old friend Andrew on board and the launched Brightpearl as a full-blown business.