Google Shopping eCommerce marketing platform Bidnamic has completed a £4 million Series A funding round.
The idea behind Bidnamic came about in 2018 when co-founders Liam Patterson and Dr Ingvar Kraatz were running Dzinga, a print-on-demand eCommerce marketplace. The store had grown to over 40 million differentiated products (SKUs) which was unmanageable for them to run as manual campaigns on the Google Shopping ad platform, so they built a unique machine learning engine to automate it for them.
The platform intrigued investors who trialled the technology across their portfolio companies.
The Leeds business has since grown to a team of 100, and supports hundreds of retailers and brands including three of The Sunday Times Fast Track 100’s fastest growing retailers in the UK: Lounge Underwear, Chilly’s Bottles and Oh Polly.
The new round was led by Gresham House Ventures, a growth equity investor specialising in software and digitally-driven businesses in the consumer, healthcare and service sectors.
It marks Bidnamic’s first institutional investment, also bolstered by existing angel investors including some of the biggest names in eCommerce and technology such as Marin Mayer, co-founder of Booking.com; Chris Forrest, board advisor to Net-A-Porter; and Luke Judge, former CEO of performance marketing agency Incubeta.
The investment will fuel R&D projects and further expansion into the US market, where it launched last year.
In 2021 Bidnamic was also selected by Tech Nation to join its Upscale programme, which hosts 33 of the UK’s best performing tech companies with Monzo, Deliveroo and Skyscanner as notable alumni.
“Gresham House Ventures are a natural partner as the team bring a wealth of experience scaling B2B SaaS, specifically ecommerce integration platform Patchworks, shipping optimisation software provider Scurri and online deals personalisation platform RevLifter,” said Patterson.
“Further alignment comes as the Gresham House Ventures team also have experience with eCommerce investments including fashion marketplace SilkFred, used photographic equipment marketplace MPB and Crew Clothing. This means the team intuitively understands the pressures retailers face.”