Mirakl, a French startup unicorn in the marketplace-as-a-service industry, has today announced plans to invest £23.5m in the UK, bucking a wider trend of European technology firms focusing on the mainland over Brexit fears.
The announcement, which will see the creation of 40 jobs in the UK over the next two years, follows Mirakl raising £235m in a Series D funding round led by UK-based investment firm Permira. This saw it achieve unicorn status with a valuation of £1.17bn.
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Through it Mirakl Marketplace Platform, a SaaS platform for both B2B and B2C companies, Mirakl enables companies to launch and scale online marketplaces. Designed to be an easy-to-use, turnkey solution, it is designed to integrate into existing ecommerce platforms.
Mirakl invests in UK as ecommerce booms
With customers including Urban Outfitters, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Siemens and Carrefour, Mirakl has seen its popularity boom amid the pandemic, which drove ecommerce to unprecedented levels.
Marketplaces run using Mirakl’s platform saw an 111% increase in gross merchandise volume in the first half of 2020, to £940m.
It now sees the UK as key to its plans for global expansion, particularly to further its growth plans in northern Europe, describing it to be of “huge strategic importance”. It also sees significant potential in the internal market due to the number of businesses that are not currently using a platform-based ecommerce solution.
“Demand for marketplaces is booming in the UK,” said Brendan Walsh, general manager at Mirakl.
“However despite clear consumer appetite, many businesses have yet to adopt a platform model. With Mirakl’s expansion, we will make it easier than ever for British companies to launch and grow an enterprise marketplace at scale, capitalise on the platform opportunity and gain a competitive edge in today’s digital economy.”
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