RedSky planning to raise up to €15m to develop tax services platform

Kilkenny-based RedSky Europe is planning to expand its fulfilment and tax offering across Europe.

RedSky Europe was founded by Ken Byrne in 2019. It was initially set up as a localised fulfilment centre for e-commerce businesses to store and dispatch inventory across Europe.

Co-founder and chief operating officer Ger Egan, a former finance director for GSK Pharmaceuticals, joined the company shortly after it was set up.

Along with its fulfilment offering, the company has developed a Vat services platform for clients to manage the tax on online sales in Europe.

“I come from an e-commerce background and we set up RedSky in 2019 as a fulfilment company, targeting US brands that want to come into Europe. While we were working on that we very quickly saw that a lot of these companies were struggling to manage Vat on sales in Europe,” Byrne told the Business Post.

The company is currently developing a fully automated SaaS Vat/Sales Tax management platform called Taxmatic, designed for e-commerce brands.

The prototype has been completed and tested with the full launch of the platform to the market happening in September.

“This is a unique end-to-end technology-based managed solution for scaling e-commerce brands based anywhere in the world,” Byrne said.

To help grow the tax division of the company, John O’Gorman, the former chief executive of payments platform Way2Pay, which was acquired by Evo Payments, was recently hired as chief executive of the Taxmatic business unit.

As part of its expansion, RedSky Europe has raised over €2 million in funding to date. State agency Enterprise Ireland has invested a further €400,000 in co-funding.

The company plans to try raise a further €12 million to €15 million in early to mid-next year to further develop the tax management division.

“The logistics business is going really well, we are going to continue to grow that business, but we see the investment going into the software platform to really scale that platform,” Byrne said.

The fulfilment arm of the business will remain based in Ireland, where it can provide its services right across Europe.

“With the Vat, we are going to be offering it in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK to start,” Byrne said.

“With Vat, where you dispatch your goods from determines what local Vat compliance you have. We will be able to offer this platform to anyone dispatching from Ireland, UK, Germany, or Netherlands. This is a real technology play where we pull all the information of any marketplace [a client] is selling on.”

In a short number of years, the company has gained major global brands and some of the largest partners in the fulfilment space, worldwide.

As part of the business expansion, employee numbers will also grow.

RedSky Europe currently employs just under 40 people, however it has plans to have 90 full time employees by mid-2024, facilitating the further growth and expansion of its fulfilment and software fintech business units.