Gresham House Ventures leads £4mn Series A funding round into Google Shopping ecommerce marketing platform Bidnamic
This marks Bidnamic’s first institutional investment, which is 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 leading performance marketing agency Incubeta, all of whom continue to champion Bidnamic’s significant growth potential.
The investment will accelerate the already rapid growth Bidnamic has achieved by fuelling R&D projects and expansion into the US market.
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 and after impressive results, Bidnamic was founded.
The 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.
Bidnamic launched in the US in 2021 and serves a growing customer base of iconic brands like Volcom and fashion marketplace Garmentory. In the same year, Bidnamic was selected by Tech Nation to join its coveted Upscale programme, which hosts 33 of the UK’s best performing tech companies with Monzo, Deliveroo and Skyscanner as notable alumni.
Henry Alty, Investment Director at Gresham House Ventures, said
“Bidnamic initially appeared on our radar after we saw first-hand the breakout growth the tech provided to retailers in our network. The company’s professional team, well-honed sales and marketing approach, capital efficient approach to growth, and the product’s proven ROI which helps deal with rising acquisition costs for online retailers all mean it is extremely well positioned to accelerate its already stellar growth.”
Liam Patterson, Co-Founder and CEO at Bidnamic, said
“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.
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.”
