CLOUDTRADE CLOSES FIRST INVESTMENT ROUND, RAISING £2 MILLION

• Investment from Calculus Capital will enable CloudTrade to continue second stage growth in the UK, and further expand into USA and European markets
• Building on 40% YOY growth and 5 years of successful global operations
• Investment round by privately owned, CloudTrade, led by business’s founders, and supported by John O’Connell, founder of the Scale Up Group

CloudTrade, the leading provider of cloud-based e-invoicing, e-order and complex data capture services, has today announced the completion of its first investment round, securing a £2million injection from Calculus Capital.

The funds will accelerate expansion of CloudTrade’s services in the US and EMEA, while bolstering the business’s second stage global growth, which currently stands at over 40% YOY globally. The newly raised funds will also increase CloudTrade’s ongoing team expansion and deepen its research and development into complex data extraction, and its application into different solutions and sectors.

Founded in 2010 by the current management team - David Cocks, Richard Manson and Richard Develyn - CloudTrade enables companies to evolve past their reliance on paper, and transact digitally with their trading partners, irrespective of size or technical maturity. CloudTrade is now one of the fastest growing e-invoice and e-document networks, connecting over 200 organisations to thousands of their trading partners, electronically, across numerous sectors and regions across the globe.

CloudTrade’s core platform, which is protected by lasting patents in Europe, the U.S. and Australia, uses unique rules-based technology with backward tracking search, to interpret, validate and extrapolate semantic meaning from documents of any type: including invoices, sales and purchase orders, advanced shipping notices and other complex, data rich documents.

David Cocks, CloudTrade’s co-founder and CEO, says: “It might sound a bit old fashioned, but the team and I were determined to prove that we had a business solution and model that worked, before we spent other people’s money. There is no doubt that we have proved that; with the business growing at over 40% YOY globally and now processing over 30,000 documents per day. We are delighted to welcome Calculus on-board as investors, and we’re excited to see that growth continue in both our existing and new markets across the globe.”

Richard Moore, Investment Director, Calculus Capital, said: “What the team at CloudTrade have done is to streamline the Purchase-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash processes. Utilising its market-leading, patented technology, CloudTrade provides a uniquely simple and non-disruptive way for trading partners to send electronic invoices, orders and other business documents, straight into the receiving organisation’s processing application. By doing that, CloudTrade enables users to extract maximum insight and data from those documents, to fully automate and integrate them into their downstream systems. Accelerating both the end-user’s digital transformation journey and the efficiency of their business, and ensuring users see back office savings in the region of 60% with supplier adoption rates of over 80-90%.”

“Our investment will help CloudTrade to strengthen their global sales and support teams, expanding their platform to cover additional languages and bolstering their presence in the European and US markets. We believe this is an exciting, second phase in the development of a ‘Little British Battler’ with strong global growth potential.”

John O’Connell, founder and CEO of the Scale-Up Group (SUG), who introduced Calculus to CloudTrade and whose SUG members have also invested in CloudTrade, says: “We created ScaleUp to help take successful technology start-ups to an even higher level of achievement, in terms of capability and international growth, to become global champions. CloudTrade is a great example of exactly that. We at SUG look forward to supporting David and the team on the acceleration of their very successful journey so far.”

CloudTrade was among the first six UK tech SMEs selected to participate in TechMarketView and Scale-Up Group’s inaugural Great British Scaleup programme event in June 2017 (CloudTrade: from ‘Battler’ to Scale-Up) having previously graduated from the TechMarketView Little British Battler programme in April 2016 (LBB CloudTrade – making e-invoicing easy).

Further information on CloudTrade’s continued growth

Over the last year, CloudTrade has grown the business through new partners, including IBM, DXC (formerly Hewlett Packard Enterprise), SAP Ariba, BT, Cegedim, Opus Capita and SupplyOn, and from an increase in projects through existing partners. This corresponds to a 20% increase in partners, and a 30% increase in end-customers using the service.

Richard Manson, CloudTrade’s co-founder and Commercial Director, explains: “Transaction volumes are the key to growing our business and the fact that we have doubled these volumes over the last couple of years demonstrates our strong business growth. As today’s investment shows, 2017-18 has been a year of solidifying the business, at the same time as expanding and futureproofing it.

“In terms of our customers, we feel that we have ‘crossed the chasm’ as a technology company and have moved in to an ‘early majority’ customer audience. It is an exciting time for us all and we look forward to helping more businesses with their digital transformation and automation journeys.”

Transaction volumes – the number of e-invoices and other documents being processed through and by CloudTrade’s platform – have more than doubled over the last couple of years from 3 million documents in 2016 to a current run rate of 8 million, and revenue has increased over 40% year on year. CloudTrade forecasts a similar increase to March 2019.

About CloudTrade

CloudTrade is one of the fastest growing e-invoice and e-document networks, connecting over 200 organisations to thousands of their trading partners electronically across numerous sectors and regions across the globe. Founded in 2010 to offer a fresh approach to e-invoicing, CloudTrade enables companies to evolve past their reliance on paper and transact digitally with their trading partners, irrespective of size or technical maturity. CloudTrade’s unique, patented technology, delivers services not widely seen in the market, in a cost-effective way. CloudTrade’s software is protected by lasting patents in Europe, the U.S. and Australia. For further information go to: http://www.cloudtradenetwork.com

How CloudTrade’s solution works

CloudTrade’s patent-protected software uses unique rules-based technology with backward tracking search, to interpret, validate, and extrapolate semantic meaning from complex documents, of any type. So, whether its invoices, sales and purchase orders or advanced shipping notices, CloudTrade processes them automatically and cost effectively.

Although CloudTrade offers organisations several ways to send complex business documents (including direct XML / EDI), by far the most popular approach is for an organisation to simply send an application generated PDF via email. When an application generates a PDF, in almost all instances it will be a text PDF. CloudTrade reads the document text straight from the PDF, without the use of OCR – which guarantees 100% quality. PDF documents are easy to use and out-of-the-box with most ERP and accounting packages. As a result, typically >90% of organisations (irrespective of shape or size!) when asked will send PDF documents – including invoices, sales and purchase orders, advanced shipping notices and other complex, data rich documents.