One of the fastest-growing technology startups in Texas has moved its headquarters to Austin from Houston.
Cart.com Inc., which has developed an end-to-end e-commerce platform, announced Dec. 9 that it's new HQ is a standalone building in downtown Austin at the corner of Brazos and Sixth streets.
Cart.com was born into the pandemic as millions of businesses were forced to reconsider their e-commerce offerings. As it grew rapidly, the company began hiring remotely while the bulk of the team worked in Houston. Soon, CEO Omair Tariq said, it was finding strong candidates in Austin's tech-heavy ecosystem and opened its office downtown in 2020.
"We opened up our jobs to find the best talent around the country, and what we discovered was ... the intensity of talent that we were getting out of Austin and the quality of talent we were getting out of Austin was just better than any other ZIP code and city around the country," Tariq said. "So we were like, 'Okay, we've got to open up an office there and call it HQ.'"
Cart.com's office is across the street from the coworking space of Capital Factory, the Austin-based organization that is an accelerator and investment firm with an increasingly statewide impact. On Dec. 9, Capital Factory named Cart.com "startup of the year" during its annual Venture Summit.
But Cart's new office space was more a product of coincidence within Texas' startup and venture ecosystem than an attempt to open next door to Capital Factory.
Tariq said he was visiting office spaces in Austin last year, bouncing from building to building. He didn't like any of them and asked his broker to show him standalone buildings that Cart could call home. The broker had one in mind at 612 Brazos St., but the owner was already working on a letter of intent with a potential tenant. Tariq, however, loved the building and asked if he could talk to the building owner and share Cart.com's story.
Below: Google Street View of 612 Brazos in downtown Austin
It turned out the building owner was Manish Patel, who had been an early investor in Cart.com.
"It was totally coincidental, and when we spoke with him, he was obviously like, 'Uh, yeah, I mean, yes, go for it,'" Tariq said. "So it was kind of a strange array of events that occurred, but that's kind of how we landed on it."
Tariq — previously chief operating officer of Houston-based Blinds.com, which was acquired by The Home Depot Inc. (NYSE: HD) in 2014 — co-founded Cart.com with Jim Jacobsen, who previously served as CEO of Cypress-based outdoors retailer RTIC Outdoors.
Cart currently has a little over 150 employees in Austin, and it plans to hire an additional 150 in the next 12 months. Tariq will remain at the Houston office, along with the company's chief strategy officer and chief of staff. Cart's chief innovation officer, chief financial officer and head of marketing will be in the Austin office. Cart also has offices in Los Angeles, Europe and Asia. It plans to open offices in Amsterdam and Poland in the first quarter of 2022, Tariq said.
It's optional for employees to be in its Austin office during the pandemic. The space has largely been designed to accommodate collaboration and meetings and to give employees a space to work outside their homes.
'We're much more focused on creating an environment where people want to be in versus an environment where people are required to come in," Tariq said.
The company declined to share revenue figures or its valuation. But Tariq said he believes Cart is the fastest growing company in Texas, and he said that the company's run rate tripled from last year to this year and he expects it to triple again in 2022.
"We are not planning on slowing down anytime soon," he said. "So if you want an adventure of a lifetime, come work with us."
And Tariq isn't shy about the company's future.
"We will go public in the next one to three years," he said. "We're operating in nonlinear timelines, right? We've gone from zero to 400 people in 12 months. We made eight acquisitions in 12 months. We've raised $150 million in 12 months. We've home to 2,600-plus brands doing close to a billion dollars in [gross merchandise value] in less than 12 months. We're not operating like most companies. So I don't think we need to follow the typical seven-year timeline to go public either."
The latest piece of that funding haul was a $98 million series B round announced in August. Investors in the company have included Oak HC/FT, PayPal Ventures, Clearco, G9 Ventures, Mercury Fund, Valedor Partners and Arsenal Growth. Austin-based Capital Factory and Moonshots Capital are also investors.
And those acquisitions include buying Sauceda Industries LLC, an Austin-based logistics company, earlier this year. Just a few weeks ago, it purchased California-based 180Commerce, which assists brands with growing their businesses on online marketplaces like Amazon, Houston Inno reported.
Cart wouldn't be the first Austin e-commerce company to go public. Austin-based BigCommerce, which helps businesses build online shops and facilitate marketing and sales, went public in August 2020.
BigCommerce is one of Cart.com's primary competitors, along with Shopify, Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. But Tariq said the companies have many differences and sometimes complement each other.
"We coexist with everybody," he said. "And what I mean by that is we have customers today that are on Shopify or BigCommerce or Magento or Salesforce Commerce Cloud that are using our fulfillment centers, that are using our marketing teams, that are using different parts of our business, and we're perfectly happy with it."
As Cart continues its hiring spree, Tariq said the company is being intentional about building a diverse team. He said, for example, Cart mandated its recruiting firm provide diverse candidates for leadership positions and lower-level positions alike.
"I'm an immigrant and a minority in this country," he said. "... I've gone through a process of building a company and being part of other companies, and I've seen the benefit of what diversity brings to the table and we're really deliberate about it."
