William Blair acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Upshop, a portfolio company of Level Equity (Level) and Prairie Capital (Prairie), in connection with its merger with Invafresh for an undisclosed amount. The transaction simultaneously signed and closed on June 21, 2024.
About the Companies
Upshop is the foremost provider of a SaaS platform designed to streamline forecasting, ordering, production, and inventory optimization processes for food retailers. Its unified platform simplifies and enhances associate tasks, promoting smarter and more interconnected operations across Fresh, Center, DSD, and eCommerce departments. With over 150 retailers and 30,000 stores relying on its mission-critical operations platform, customers have witnessed substantial enhancements in sales, shrinkage reduction, food safety, and sustainability throughout their stores.
Level is a private investment firm focused on providing capital to rapidly growing software and technology-driven businesses. Level provides long term capital across all transaction types in support of continued growth. The firm has raised $3.0 billion in committed capital, has backed over 100 companies since inception, and has offices in New York, NY and Greenwich, CT.
Founded in Chicago in 1997, Prairie is a private equity fund with a long and successful track record of scaling growth-oriented, lower middle-market companies in partnership with talented founders and management teams. Since inception, Prairie has invested over $1 billion in over 100 platform companies. The company makes control equity investments in founder-owned companies that require company-building investments to evolve into scalable platforms capable of sustaining accelerated growth. Prairie targets companies that participate in growing subsectors within the business services, consumer, education, healthcare, industrial, and technology industries.
With a combined 500+ years of Freshology experience, the heritage of Invafresh has enabled fresh food retailers to create extraordinary store operations performance and differentiated customer experiences. As the leader of Freshology, Invafresh is deployed in over 350 grocery retailers spanning a global reach of 35 countries with $100’s of millions of Fresh revenue being transacted daily, to provide AI-enhanced demand forecasting, merchandising, replenishment, sustainability and compliance, and waste prevention solutions.
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