City round up: Praetura leads investment round; GB Group upbeat AGM statement
Praetura Ventures has led a £3.25m series A investment into Ocula, a growing SaaS business specialising in providing AI insights to e-commerce businesses.
Belfast based Ocula has developed an AI tool, Ocula Boost, to help major brands such as Boots and AO.com convert more sales, improve their customer experience and decrease the time spent manually enhancing product pages. With over 25 major customers today, the business plans to triple its client base over the next 24 months.
According to Ocula, the ongoing challenge facing online retailers is that product pages are not optimised when they go live, which means they lack key information, are inconsistent and are rarely set up for SEO success.
Ocula uses AI and large language models to enhance product pages, creating insight into the improvements that can be made and by auto-generating critical content, such as product descriptions.
For Blain’s Farm & Fleet, a major US retail chain based out of Wisconsin, Ocula Boost delivered a 15% uplift on its conversion rate, which measures how many visits to a web page are turned into sales. The retailer also reported a 95% reduction in time spent setting up and managing pages.
In addition to Manchester-based Praetura Ventures, Ocula has also raised further investment from long term investor Castelnau Group and Lloyds Banking Group and its fintech investment team. Ocula will use the investment to scale its sales and technology teams, as well as developing new and existing product teams.
Thomas McKenna, Ocula co-founder and CEO, said: “We have created something special at Ocula from both a product and culture perspective. Users consistently tell us that our generative AI is levelling the playing field with their most advanced competitors. We’ve achieved this by bringing together some of the brightest science, engineering and product talent in the UK and beyond. This investment will see us go faster when it comes to UK and US expansion and deliver the next generation of exciting AI features to clients.”
Peter Carway, investment director at Praetura Ventures, added: “AI’s role within e-commerce has grown exponentially over the past several years. There’s now a wealth of incredibly exciting developments for retailers of all sizes, as proved by the work being done by Ocula. Having invested in this space before, we were drawn to Ocula’s proposition and suite of highly sophisticated products as well as the strength of Ocula’s co-founders Thomas and Gregory, who we’re looking forward to supporting with more than money.”
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Richard Longdon
Chester-based identity and location software business GB Group will tell its Annual General Meeting today that profits have exceeded expectations.
In a statement to the market this morning (23 July 2024) Richard Longdon, Non-Executive Chair, reported that group revenue of £277.3 million was driven by accelerated growth in Identity during the fourth quarter as anticipated, and adjusted operating profit was ahead of market expectations.
“This reflects the excellent progress achieved in FY24 to reduce our complexity, with £10 million of annualised cost savings delivered that will benefit the business over the long term.
“Our focus on simplicity and cost-effectiveness has enabled investment in product innovation to enhance our leadership in the identity fraud and location intelligence markets. We are driving greater collaboration and global alignment to more effectively leverage our scale and expertise, with the improving performance of our Americas Identity business achieved by strengthening our go-to-market, sales enablement and product capability in that region.
“As we look to the longer term, the Board remains confident that GBG’s strong competitive differentiation will continue to underpin our leadership positions across the markets we serve. The technological capabilities we have built and our highly repeatable business model will enable us to capitalise upon the significant growth opportunities ahead to deliver significant and enduring shareholder value,” he said.
