February 13, 2024 – Prairie Capital, a Chicago-based middle-market private equity firm, has sold its majority position in Upshop (the “Company”), a Prairie Capital VI portfolio company, to Level Equity, a leading technology growth equity firm. Prairie and members of Upshop management retained significant ownership stakes in the business.
Upshop is the leading provider of a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform designed to streamline forecasting, ordering, production, and inventory optimization processes for food retailers. The unified platform simplifies and enhances associate tasks, fostering smarter and more interconnected operations across fresh, center-aisle, direct store delivery, and eCommerce departments. Boasting a clientele of over 150 retailers and 30,000 stores, Upshop empowers customers with substantial enhancements in sales, shrink reduction, food safety, and sustainability.
Upshop exemplifies Prairie’s investment strategy of partnering with founders and management teams to build market-leading companies in high-growth industries. During Prairie’s three years as majority owner, the investment thesis focused on evolving Upshop from a fresh item management vendor to a total store software platform in the highly fragmented and growing retail technology industry. This required substantial company-building investments including: (i) acquiring and integrating three specialized point solution providers to expand Upshop’s service offering and capabilities; (ii) building a market leading management team; (iii) re-architecting the Company’s software platform to a cloud-based total store operations SaaS solution; (iv) expanding the engineering and sales teams to accelerate the product roadmap and execute on a robust sales pipeline; and (v) rebranding the Company to Upshop to reflect its expanded capabilities and value proposition.
Significant market opportunities and a large M&A pipeline prompted Prairie and management to seek a strategic partner to provide growth capital in order to further accelerate the total store operations strategy.
William Blair served as Upshop’s financial advisor and Reed Smith served as legal counsel.
For more information on Upshop, please contact:
Tony Danielak at tdanielak@prairie-capital.com
Chris Killackey at ckillackey@prairie-capital.com