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Vend adds $25 million to capital base

Cloud point of sale company Vend will fast-track its plans to open a London office this year and grow across Europe after a $25 million funding injection led by Valar Ventures’ Peter Thiel and Australia-based Square Peg Capital.

Berlin’s Point Nine Capital also invested in this round, having put $2 million in to Vend in 2012, two years after the Auckland company launched, and reinvesting in 2013.

The capital will also allow the addition of new partners, staff and customers throughout North America, the UK and Europe, the company says.

“2014 is going to be a very big year for Vend,” says Vaughan Rowsell, the company’s CEO. “With the support of Peter Thiel and Square Peg Capital, the additional funding will accelerate our North American plans, allowing us to grow our major market and extend into small and independent retail shops across the continent.

“The last few years have seen a resurgence of independent retailers who have become more competitive against big chain stores by adopting cloud based POS software. Vend is proud to be helping drive that movement, by offering brick and mortar retailers the kind of tools and business intelligence previously available only to chain stores and online businesses.”

Thiel, Valar’s co-founder, also pointed to small companies as a growth market for Vend on the back of the growth in cloud technologies.

“We see the revolution that cloud computing is bringing to small business as one of the most exciting areas of growth for the US market. Vend is poised to help millions of small to medium businesses move onto the cloud to do better business.”

Vend’s industry partners currently include PayPal (secure in-store payments), Xero (online accounting) Stitchlabs (multi-channel inventory management), Swarm (in-store customer analytics) and SelfPay (customer self-checkout).

Valar Ventures has also backed Xero, investing in its $180 million funding round last year.

Vend’s technology has been installed in more than 10,000 stores in over 100 countries. It was recently listed in Monocle’s Top 25 of retail along with Kiwi brands Hip Group and Farro and says it’s been receiving emails from around the world in response to that.

Amanda Sachtleben is an Auckland writer and social media type, who's also Idealog's former tech editor and business journalist.

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