Serent Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity firm focused on investing in high-growth technology and services businesses, has made a minority investment in BirchStreet Systems, the leading provider of cloud-based procure-to-pay automation software for customers in the hospitality, restaurant, and foodservice industries.
BirchStreet’s suite of solutions encompasses eProcurement, Accounts Payable Automation, Inventory Management, Recipe System Management, and Capital Projects. The software increases efficiency by streamlining many manual processes and creates a comprehensive, intelligent view of spending compliance. In doing so, BirchStreet offers value to its customers by reducing costs, simplifying and improving visibility into key business processes, enhancing control over spending decisions, and improving on-contract spend compliance. The solutions also provide customers with workflow efficiencies that allow them to optimize back-office productivity. BirchStreet’s customers, which include most of the major multinational hospitality brands and many of the largest management companies, process over $15 billion in spend across nearly 6 million purchase orders to over 200,000 suppliers annually.
“Since founding BirchStreet Systems in 2002, we have focused on providing exceptional value to our customers as one of the first to market with a truly ground-up multitenant cloud-based technology architecture. Our solutions are highly differentiated through their ability to address both direct and indirect spend categories – functionality made possible through the breadth of our product offerings and supplier network,” said Sushil Garg, founder and CEO of BirchStreet.
He continued, “As BirchStreet enters the next chapter of its growth story, we sought an investment partner who would bring domain expertise in procure-to-pay software and hospitality technology. We also sought a partner who brings to bear a broad set of resources that will help us execute on our growth strategy, while maintaining our reputation for customer value and product innovation. We feel that the alignment with Serent Capital across these dimensions could not be stronger.”
“BirchStreet is a leader and innovator in procure-to-pay. As investors, it is rare for us to encounter a business with such a strong position in its market, whose success is demonstrated by highly satisfied customers, excellent growth, and strong customer retention rates,” said Lance Fenton, Partner at Serent Capital. “We are incredibly impressed by the business that Sushil and his management team have built, and we are thrilled to partner with them to drive continued growth and success.”
Serent’s investment in BirchStreet Systems represents its sixth recent investment in the Restaurant and Hospitality Technology space— Knowland (2012), FranConnect (2014), Compeat (2015), Meeting Intelligence / HIS (2016), and Ctuit (2017).