Open ECX Wins Technology Business of the Year at 2026 Business Awards

We’ve been named Technology Business of the Year at the 2026 Greater Manchester Business Awards, run by Business Awards UK.

It caps a decade of quietly getting on with the job. Four billion B2B invoices are processed in the UK every year and most of them are still entered into a system by hand. We were founded in 2014 to fix that and we’ve since been trusted by over 17,000 businesses, making us one of the UK's most trusted names in B2B transaction automation.

Our numbers back it up: revenue grew 36.7% in 2024 and 46.34% in 2025, fuelled by our expansion into pharmaceutical and medical, and food and beverage, alongside the construction, manufacturing and distribution sectors where we first made our name.

Our platform's job is simple to describe and hard to build: take invoices, orders and statements in whatever format they arrive, structured EDI, XML or a plain unstructured PDF and convert them into clean, accurate data automatically. No manual re-keying, no chasing suppliers to change how they send things. We hold certified Peppol Access Point status, putting us among a small number of UK providers who can make that claim and are certified to ISO 27001 and ISO 9001.

Customers feel the difference almost immediately; Farrans automated 20,000 invoices in its first year alone, saving over 60 days of manual input from a single team member. Direct Heating and Plumbing reclaimed six hours of staff time a day that used to disappear into invoice processing. Arco, the UK's leading health and safety provider, now processes 98% of orders in seconds. Grundfos rolled Open ECX out across 20 countries to confirm multilingual orders within minutes, a process that used to take days.

Over the last year, we’ve expanded our headquarters by 50% to keep up with demand and extended our reach into North America, Australia and Europe through strategic partnerships.

With the UK's April 2029 e-invoicing mandate on the horizon, that groundwork matters. We’ve been building toward this for years and as a certified Peppol Access Point, we’re already positioned to help UK businesses make the shift when the rules land.

Technology Business of the Year is a nice trophy for the cabinet. But the real story is the one behind it: a UK business quietly doing the unglamorous work of making other businesses run better, one invoice, order and statement at a time.