Pricing intelligence specialist Profitero has secured $8m in new funding that will be used to “aggressively expand” in North America and other global markets.

Profitero, which works with Ocado and Waitrose in the UK and Sam’s Club in the US, said the financing from venture capital firm Polaris Partners would also allow it to more than double its 40-strong engineering team over the next 18 months.

“We are excited to partner with Polaris as we look to continue growing our business by 300% year-on-year and to build out our North American business,” said Vol Pigrukh, co-founder and CEO of Profitero.

It also announced the appointment of Irfan Salim, former CEO of the online brand protection company MarkMonitor, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2012. MarkMonitor was also backed by Polaris.

Profitero supplies information to retailers on competitors’ pricing and promotions using web-scraping data, but is also looking to work more with suppliers.

It is headquartered in Ireland, but the engineering team is based in Belarus.