Houston-based Cart.com, a provider of end-to-end e-commerce services and software, raised $25 million in Series A financing.
The Series A funding round was led by Houston-based venture capital firm Mercury Fund and Winter Park, Florida-based Arsenal Growth, Cart.com announced April 15. The round also saw participation from Moonshots Capital and Scarlet Venture Fund. The Series A round, Cart.com’s second round in five months, follows a $20 million seed round led by Bearing Ventures, the firm said. To date, Cart.com has raised more than $45 million.
Cart.com works with brands that want to scale their businesses online. The company offers a range of e-commerce software products and services, including offerings for online storefronts, digital marketing, payment processing and more. Cart.com was founded in September 2020 by co-founder and CEO Omair Tariq, former COO of Houston-based Blinds.com, and co-founder and executive chairman Jim Jacobsen, co-founder and former CEO of RTIC Outdoors. Blinds.com was acquired by The Home Depot Inc. (NYSE: HD) in 2014 for an undisclosed amount.
“The current e-commerce offerings favor the service providers, not the brands. We are on a mission to flip that dynamic and put the sellers back in charge of their e-commerce journey and their customer relationships,” Tariq said. “Our team will continue to obsess over our brands’ success, so they can obsess over their customers. This is what will create tremendous long term shareholder value and be the true measure of our success.”
Cart.com plans to deploy the Series A funding to make key hires and to respond to increasing customer demand. The firm has over 800 customers in its pipeline since the beginning of 2021. To accelerate its growth strategy, Cart.com said it has already made five acquisitions, including two full-service digital marketing agencies. In January, Cart.com announced the acquisition of AmeriCommerce, a Beaumont, Texas-based provider of e-commerce services and storage supplies with nationwide fulfillment capabilities.
“Competition in the e-commerce market is reaching a precipice, and only those companies with the pedigree, vision, technology and the been-there-done-that perspective will be able to truly shift the surge away from market monopolies and provide power back to the brands themselves to the benefit of the businesses and their customers,” said Blair Garrou, co-founder and managing director at Mercury Fund. “Our financial commitment illustrates our confidence in the mission and strategy of Cart.com. The team assembled has incredible opportunity to be a true market leader and pioneer E-Commerce-as-a-Service (ECaaS) in the e-commerce services space.”
