Glen Westlake, CEO, and Mark Sheldon, CTO, established BrightTarget in 2014 in Birmingham. Todd Burkowitz of Gartner, the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, named BrightTarget among Europe's top three most innovative European start-ups in the Market Guide for SaaS Based Predictive Analytics Applications for B2B Sales and Marketing 2016 study.

The acquisition is fully in line with Sidetrade's strategy to enhance business performance via the Sales-to-Cash cycle. BrightTarget has developed powerful Machine Learning algorithms based on the analysis of historic transactions (invoices) and customer behavior incorporating underlying data (sector, geographic area, size) enriched with millions of other points of insight (press articles, social media engagement, corporate websites). BrightTarget's solution allows companies to:

• Define the Predictive Customer Lifetime Value calculated on the basis of the forecast of the net profit that is expected to occur from the future relationship between a business and a customer
• Identify those clients most likely to be lost by a company to significantly improve retention rates
• Score the best business opportunities on a company's existing client base (Upsell/Cross-sell) to  focus sales teams with better targets for customers with strongest potential
• Generate a list of high-quality leads with strong conversion potential related to their Predictive Customer Lifetime Value

BrightTarget's Cloud technology can be quickly deployed and interfaced with leading Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) and Marketing Automation platforms, avoiding costly investment in Big Data infrastructure and recruitment of Data Scientists. Leading companies, among them Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC, BSS Industrial (part of Travis Perkins PLC) and Speedy Hire, are now benefiting on a regular basis from BrightTarget's technology solutions to uncover unsuspected business opportunities among their hundred of thousands of leads or customers and to prioritize rapid action for those customers who show the greatest risk.

Glen Westlake says: "Working with Sidetrade represents a real opportunity and a fantastic experience for me and my teams. We're extremely enthusiastic about combining business operations with Sidetrade because we share the same ambition: to make Artificial Intelligence accessible at the heart of the business process, creating measurable value for our customers. By making our platforms available to Sidetrade's existing customer base across four European countries, BrightTarget will rapidly become a world leader in the exciting and promising field of Predictive B2B Sales & Marketing."

BrightTarget and Sidetrade share experience of creating state-of-the-art Machine Learning algorithms and are ideally suited to co-develop a shared Sales-to-Cash performance technology platform.