British eCommerce provider secures additional financing in 2015, as leading North American retailers deploy its Big Content Platform

Amplience, the leading on-demand Big Content Platform, today announced that it has received an $8 million round of financing from Silicon Valley Bank and Columbia Lake Partners. This latest financing reflects the company's impressive growth in North America. Over the last 12 months, clients including Panasonic North America, Marc Jacobs, John Varvatos, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Theory Helmut Lang have adopted its market-leading Big Content Platform. This announcement follows an earlier $10.5 million Series B round of funding led by Octopus Ventures in March 2015.

Andrew Hunter, Director at Silicon Valley Bank, commented that: 'Amplience continues to impress us with its drive and focus, its technology innovation, and its consistent success in winning new clients both in the US and in Northern European markets. The Amplience Big Content Platform responds to a clear and significant market opportunity and Silicon Valley Bank is delighted to provide additional capital to allow the team to grow this even further.'

Amplience's Big Content Platform has been enhanced with the addition of integrated Social and User Generated Content (UGC) capabilities, and the firm has also launched an updated Demandware Cartridge 3.0. Plans to enhance the platform during 2016 span integrated analytics, and the addition of a range of Big Content Applications.

Amplience CEO and founder, James Brooke, said: 'These are exciting times at Amplience. We've enjoyed strong growth in both Northern America and Europe as retailers increasingly see the value of a single solution that transforms the economics of digital content. We enable them to deliver more engaging content experiences more often, and across every touch point, while driving down production costs. This round of funding, coupled with significant additions to our senior team and our technology roadmap for 2016 positions us for another year of stellar growth.'

Commenting on the latest round of funding, Craig W. Netterfield, Managing Partner at Columbia Lake Partners, concluded: 'At Columbia Lake Partners, we're motivated by innovative European technology companies, especially those focused on expansion into the North American market. There's no doubt that there is a lot going on in the eCommerce sector right now but Amplience really stands out thanks to its track record in developing outstanding technology that helps retailers to enhance the bottom line, driving outstanding engagement and sales. With a really strong leadership team driving the business forward, Amplience ticks all the boxes as a really smart investment'.

About Silicon Valley Bank
For more than 30 years, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has helped innovative businesses and their investors move bold ideas forward, fast. SVB provides a range of targeted financial services and expertise through its office in the UK. With commercial and international banking services, SVB helps address the unique needs of innovators. Forbes named SVB one of America's best banks (2015) and of America's best managed companies (2014). In 2014, SVB was recognized as Service Provider of the Year for the third year in a row and the Investor Allstar Awards in London.
For further information about SVB's services, please visit www.svb.com/uk

About Columbia Lake Partners
Columbia Lake Partners is an experienced team of investors providing growth loans to European technology companies. In prior roles the partners have extended credit and managed portfolio relationships of greater than £300 million to over 100 companies.
For further information please visit www.clpgrowth.com

About Octopus Ventures
At Octopus Ventures we look for unusually talented teams intent on building businesses that can scale explosively to create, transform or dominate an industry. In recent years we have been fortunate to back the founding teams of over 50 companies across Europe including Zoopla Property Group, Secret Escapes, SwiftKey and graze.com. We can invest from £250,000 to £25 million in a first round of funding and will look to follow in subsequent rounds. We are proud to be known as one of the most entrepreneur friendly investors in Europe and a significant part of our portfolio consists of referrals from existing teams we work with or serial entrepreneurs who we have previously backed.

The Ventures team is part of Octopus Investments, one of the UK's leading investment management companies specialising in smaller company investing, with more than £5 billion of funds under management. http://www.octopusventures.com/

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