Atlanta startup SmartCommerce Inc. raised $12.2 million in a Series B round, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
New York-based Argentum Capital Partners led the round, with participation from First Analysis Corp., according to a company announcement. Walter Barandiarán, of Argentum, will join the startup’s board of directors.
SmartCommerce, founded in 2016, produces the Click2Cart platform, which lets consumers add products to the virtual shopping carts directly from digital ads, influencer blogs, emails and videos.
SmartCommerce works with consumer-packaged-goods brands, such as The Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO), The Procter & Gamble Co. (NYSE: PG) and Nestlé. Those brands pay for the Click2Cart platform, and the products can get routed to the virtual carts of more than 500 retail partners, including Amazon, Walmart and Target.
The purpose of the platform is to make digital ads more useful for brands. SmartCommerce’s growth comes during a time e-commerce exploded in popularity because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Online has been where most of the growth was occurring for CPG brands anyway," SmartCommerce CEO Jennifer Silverberg. "But it just accelerated that to a tipping point for the brands, and they started paying more attention to it last year."
That explosion proved particularly beneficial for Atlanta as an emerging tech hub. Business-to-business software startups dominate the innovation ecosystem and often produce solutions to increase efficiencies in fulfillment, payments and digital marketing for other brands.
SmartCommerce is just one example of a startup in growth mode because of the e-commerce uptick. Relay Payments raised $43 million last year for producing a contactless payment solution for the trucking industry. Stord, a cloud-based supply chain management software and logistics network, saw a 500% revenue growth in 2020.
SmartCommerce says the Click2Cart product has driven more than $1 billion of products into carts in the past year.
The Click2Cart platform removes the "friction" between the time a consumer sees an ad and when they buy the product. Silverberg said the startup focuses on CPG brands because of the drastic differences in digital shopping from other types of companies. For example, she said a consumer would want to customize which iPad they're buying after clicking on an Apple ad but wouldn't want the same options when trying to make a simpler purchase, such as a bottle of Coke or pack of gum.
Silverberg said SmartCommerce started in Atlanta because of its connections to ATDC, Georgia Tech's incubator program. The city served as a good place to raise early-stage funding. It previously raised around $5 million in 2018 with support from local seed-stage firm Valor Ventures.
Now, the startup is looking to grow its 40-person team, which is based about half in Atlanta. SmartCommerce has other offices in San Francisco and Barcelona, Spain.
Silverberg leads the startup that also includes members from the executive team of Channel Intelligence, which was acquired by Google in 2013.
