Australian e-commerce specialist UltraServe has launched a $5 million capital raising to accelerate its international growth into the US and European markets, in response to increasing client demand.
UltraServe, a privately-owned company in which technology entrepreneur Simon Hackett first invested in 2014 and is now the majority shareholder, is achieving strong international growth having opened its US office in 2016 and a new European office recently.
UltraServe specialises in delivering e-commerce applications in the cloud, using its proprietary SmartStack software technology to provide a fast, reliable and resilient way to provision and maintain an e-commerce suite for enterprises. During the past 18 months, UltraServe has won multiple global customers, doubled its staff numbers, established serious traction in the US market, and has continued to enhance its technology and services.
UltraServe CEO Matthew Hyland said the additional capital would enable the company to accelerate its international expansion and innovation. “We’ll use these funds to further our geographic expansion into Europe, to build out our US operations and to accelerate product enhancements,” he said.
“We established the London office to meet European client demand, and we’re increasing our presence in the Chicago office ahead of the release of the next version of our SmartStack software, later this year.
“International demand for our services is very strong as demonstrated by the number of new contracts signed with major global customers during the last 12 months, with about three-quarters of these new customers coming from the US and now the European markets.
“Our sales pipeline is heavily weighted towards the US market, producing more than 75 per cent of our new customer opportunities, while we’ve already seen strong interest from the European market despite only opening our office in the UK a few weeks ago.
“To date, we’ve managed to achieve all this through self-funding, via our operating cash flows. By bringing in new capital, we can build on these foundations, accelerate our growth plans, and grab the significant global market opportunity that we see in front of us.”
Simon Hackett said UltraServe had a unique competitive advantage. “UltraServe has created outstanding technology that orchestrates, manages and hosts the deployment of enterprise-level Internet commerce websites,” he said.
“UltraServe’s technology turns a complicated, slow and error-prone manual deployment process for e-commerce participants into a smooth, automated, rapid and reliable experience. SmartStack equips customers to innovate at the speed of their thought processes rather than at the speed of their system administrators.”
