Tradeshift

Tradeshift

Industry	Software
Founded	May 2010
Founder	Christian Lanng, Mikkel Hippe Brun, Gert Sylvest
Headquarters	San Francisco, New York, London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Paris, Munich, Suzhou, Tokyo, Sydney
Number of employees	300
Website	tradeshift.com

Tradeshift is a cloud-based business network connecting buyers and suppliers. It was founded in Copenhagen in 2010 by Christian Lanng, Mikkel Hippe Brun, and Gert Sylvest. The Tradeshift network currently supports 800,000 businesses in over 200 countries on the platform. Product offerings address Enterprise, Mid-Market and Small Business customers and suppliers across the procure-to-pay spectrum, including procurement, e-invoicing and supplier management. The rapid adoption of the service drew attention from international media, including Wired and Financial Times.

All of the founders have a background in the Danish public sector, where they created the world's first large scale peer-to-peer infrastructure for e-business called Easytrade. This innovation was nominated for the European eGovernment Awards in 2009. The founders also had leading roles (Governing board member, Technical Director) in the European Commission project PEPPOL, which is aiming to enable cross-border electronic trade inside the European Union.

The Tradeshift platform has attracted a number of experienced high profile investors such as Morten Lund, who served as Chairman for the company (a position now held by CEO Christian Lanng), Jon Bosak, who co-created XML and works on the technical advisory board, Mårten Mickos, Last.fm backer Stefan Glaenzer and another long-time angel investor Klaus Lovgreen.

In May 2011, Tradeshift raised $7 million from Notion Capital. In October that year, it raised a further $17 million, which established its total market value at around $137 million. The participants in the later round were ru-Net and Kite Ventures, both of which are Moscow-based investment firms.

In February 2014, Tradeshift received $75 million from Singapore’s Scentan Ventures, which the company said it would use to expand its business in Japan and China, where many of its customers have suppliers. Scentan's involvement now values Tradeshift at $300 million.