Glen Westlake, CEO, and Mark Sheldon, CTO, launched BrightTarget in 2014. Recently BrightTarget was named among Europe’s top three most innovative European start-ups in the Market Guide for SaaS Based Predictive Analytics Applications for B2B Sales and Marketing 2016 study by Gartner, says the company.
The acquisition is in line with Sidetrade’s strategy to enhance business performance via the sales-to-cash cycle. BrightTarget has developed machine learning algorithms based on the analysis of historic transactions (invoices) and customer behaviour incorporating underlying data (sector, geographic area, size) enriched with other points of insight (press articles, social media engagement, corporate websites).
Glen Westlake says: "Working with Sidetrade represents a real opportunity and a fantastic experience for me and my teams. We’re extremely enthusiastic about combining business operations with Sidetrade because we share the same ambition: to make Artificial Intelligence accessible at the heart of the business process and creating measurable value for our customers. By making our platforms available to Sidetrade’s existing customer base across four European countries, BrightTarget will rapidly become a world leader in the exciting and promising field of predictive B2B sales and marketing."
Olivier Novasque, CEO of Sidetrade group, states: “We’ve been hugely impressed by the power of BrightTarget’s algorithms. To have the ability to precisely identify – in more than seven out of ten cases – those customers with the greatest risk or those who hold greater business value for you carries an immense advantage for any company. We’ve discovered within BrightTarget a rich seam of artificial intelligence in the field of customer management. By bringing together our expertise, our strengths and our talents, we’re expanding our offer through our ability to create a unique platform for the sales-to-cash cycle. The combination of BrightTarget and Sidetrade will enable our clients to generate more upstream business opportunities while the Sidetrade Payment Intelligence Solution will offer them downstream opportunities to carry out better forecasting and greater cash generation. In making artificial intelligence accessible at the heart of business, our aim is to become a strategic partner for our clients and to bring them extraordinary value across the whole of their sales-to-cash cycle.”
