BeautyMatter discovered that the SAAS platform that took the beauty industry by storm has quietly been operating in receivership (UK equivalent of bankruptcy). As recently as last week, the team was making commitments without providing full visibility of the UK business's current financial status.

WHO: ProQuo is a brand management platform founded in 2015 by Nadim Sadek that harnesses the power of AI to enable marketers to monitor, create, strategize, and make the right decisions for their brands.

WHY: Administration is the primary procedure in UK insolvency law when a company is unable to pay its debts. The company's management is usually replaced by an insolvency practitioner whose statutory duty is to rescue the company, save the business, or get the best result possible.

DETAILS:

• The ProQuo AI business and its assets were acquired out of receivership by Grafton Capital on August 5, 2022.The UK business and all UK employees have been transferred to a new UK company, ProQuo AI International Limited.
• ProQuo AI Inc., the US division of ProQuo AI, was unaffected by this transaction.
• Tom Morrell, partner and CFO at Grafton Capital, told BeautyMatter it was restructuring the business without providing details. 
• Morrell also shared that Grant Thornton is the administrator. At the time of publishing and to our knowledge, Grant Thornton has not been in touch with creditors, of which BeautyMatter is one. However, the ProQuo AI management team, as recently as last week, has been making commitments without providing full visibility of the business's current financial status. 
• Nadim Sadek, founder and former CEO at ProQuo AI, has left the business and has been replaced by incoming CEO Jim Brennan.
• Advertising agency Mother and data platform Dynata participated in a £5MM investment round in February 2021 with plans to raise a Series A. 
• Crunchbase has total funding raised by the business at $6.1 million.