Revolutionary business social network chooses Notion Capital as partner for growth
London, 16 May 2011: Tradeshift, the social network for business and one of the most talked about European start-ups, today announced new capital fundraising of up to $7M from Notion Capital. The funding also comes on the back of key customer contract wins with, amongst others, the NHS and the French and Irish governments. Tradeshift has already taken on seed funding from PayPal, a subsidiary of eBay, who are a technology partner for the company.
Notion Capital, the venture fund created by the team that founded, grew and sold MessageLabs for $700M, was chosen over a number of other investment partners due to their first hand experience of growing a highly innovative European start-up into a global technology success story.
Tradeshift provides an innovative and easy to use online business network to send, receive and manage e-invoices. Launched in 2010 by pioneers in open e-business who created the e-invoicing system for the Danish government, it now covers over 180 countries with more than 50,000 registered businesses and is the world’s fastest growing business social network, with growth in 2011 of more than 60% per month. The company today announced major contract wins with organisations including the NHS, Adetef (French government procurement), Coop and DSV that together represent supply chains well in excess of a million companies to whom the Tradeshift service will be promoted.
The commercial potential of Tradeshift makes it one of the most significant investments Notion Capital has made since its inception in 2009. Managing the invoicing process is an essential component of commerce but remains one of the biggest pain points for businesses today. Labour intensive and ineffective, it can drain resources and slow down cash flow. Tradeshift’s unique web-based invoicing platform addresses these inefficiencies as the business social network can be shared for free between suppliers and customers and, without any integration requirements, it can be used immediately to send, receive and manage invoices, purchase orders and credit notes electronically. As such, it quickly becomes a key part of its users’ overall business processes, and its adoption between companies and their customers and suppliers is highly viral.
In the future, Tradeshift will provide a range of additional web-based financial services that enable organisations to do business more efficiently. And later this month the company will launch its Apps Store delivering a range of business-friendly apps developed by its own team and the Tradeshift developer community.
“Tradeshift is undoubtedly one of the most exciting businesses we’ve come across since setting up Notion in 2009,” says Stephen Chandler, Managing Partner at Notion Capital. “Tradeshift is led by a team who are real subject matter experts in their field, extremely strong both technically and commercially and have a very clear vision of where they want to take the business - it has the potential to become the de facto business social network for B2B communications and processes. Tradeshift is the single most disruptive proposition to this market and is set to play a major part in its transformation.”
Christian Lanng, CEO and co-founder of Tradeshift, commented, “The fact that Notion Capital was the team behind MessageLabs was one of the main reasons we chose to partner with them. Their experience in having done exactly what we want to achieve, makes them invaluable advisors when it comes to ramping up sales and marketing, building up our brand and expanding internationally. We’re focused on building Tradeshift into a global business and feel positive about being able to draw on the experience of a team that have done it before.”
Chandler concluded, “There are clear parallels between Tradeshift and MessageLabs – both highly innovative B2B internet-based services, both bringing an entirely new approach to addressing a common pain point for businesses, and, at the same time, shaking up a sleepy industry. Their growth curve is mirroring MessageLabs’ during its early stages, and we’re impressed with the momentum Tradeshift already has. We are really excited to be part of this opportunity and look forward to working with Tradeshift to fulfil their huge potential.”
