By Krystal Hu
(Reuters) – Enable, a startup that sells rebate software to trading partners, has raised $120 million in a latest funding round that valued it at $1 billion, the company said on Tuesday.
The funding round was led by its existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partner. Its previous capital raise over a year ago had put Enable’s value at over $800 million.
The fresh private funding in a slowing market for growth stage financing comes as the software firm more than doubled its revenue, according to the company.
Founded in the UK in 2016 before relocating its headquarters to San Francisco in 2020, Enable offers cloud-based software to manufacturers, distributors and retailers to manage the rebate program in their supply chain. Its customers include Schneider Electric and Home Depot.
Business-to-business companies offer rebates when their customers meet some benchmark in spending to offer purchase incentives and build loyalty. Some sellers in physical goods still manually track the progress in spreadsheets.
“We’ve built the software company in a space that was quite unknown and quite behind the scenes, but people are realizing this is the way to actually drive the economy and drive the supply chain by using these rebates in a strategic way,” Enable co-founder and CEO Andrew Butt said in an interview.
The company said it plans to invest in research and development to apply artificial intelligence (AI) in its products, from generating contracts to extracting pricing insights from data to help customers drive more sales.
It is also eyeing geographic expansion of its global presence. Enable now employs about 550 workers across the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia. The U.S. accounts for less than half of its revenue.
Butt, who ran the company without venture capital funding in its early years, said he is still paying attention to unit economics, but that the focus at this stage is on growth.
“Given the gap in the market, they’re able to persist and grow despite a lot of the macro (economic conditions). They’re not even slowing down and that’s rare to see at the scale,” said Arsham Memarzadeh, Partner at Lightspeed who led the funding round.
(Reporting by Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
