Wesupply delivers to Sainsbury’s – and a whole lot more

(By Anthony Miller – Wednesday 15th July 2009 8:00am). In our never-ending quest to bring to your attention some of the ‘Little British Battlers’ that are punching way above their weight, I had the opportunity for a long conversation with Bob Godfrey yesterday, the CEO of supply chain management SaaS supplier, Wesupply. I was introduced to Bob through Geoff Finlay, whom some of you with longer memories will recall was at one time CEO at logistics software firm, Kewill, but is now ‘entrepreneur-at-large’.

Bob was brought into Wesupply three years ago by LMS Capital, the recently AIM-listed venture capital firm demerged from London Merchant Securities. LMS holds all but a trifling amount of Wesupply’s shares. It’s fair to say that since Bob’s been on board, Wesupply has undergone somewhat of a renaissance, after frankly a moribund first 6-7 years of its existence.

Undoubtedly Wesupply's biggest scoop was a multi-million pound deal with Sainsbury’s in April in conjunction with its hosting partner, IBM. Not bad for a player with sub-£5m revenues and still a short stretch from profit. Which only goes to show the utmost importance of Wesupply’s alliance with IBM – there’s simply no way large corporates like Sainsbury’s (or indeed Poundland, Jewson, Graham, and many more) would entertain running their supply chain on a SaaS start-up unless it was backed by an industry giant.

Bob has big plans for the business. Despite doubling revenues these past couple of years, Wesupply lacks critical mass. M&A is on the agenda for the right opportunity, both to build scale and to extend geographical reach. We wish them well.