Cart.com has returned to Houston, but the e-commerce company will wait a little bit longer to announce where — or if — it will be finding a new headquarters location.
When Cart.com’s comeback was announced last fall, company leaders said that a new HQ space to be a central location for its employees. Cart.com has five corporate office locations currently listed on its website, including its current Houston location at the Cannon West Houston and its previous Austin office.
However, Cart.com Chief Growth Officer and co-founder Remington Tonar said via a spokesperson that Cart.com would wait until the second half of 2024 to decide on finding a new site. Tonar previously told the HBJ that Cart.com was looking at locations in the same area of town as the Cannon location.
Cart.com was co-founded at the Cannon, and Tonar previously held the position of chief revenue officer at the coworking space.
The relocation to Houston followed Cart.com hitting a unicorn valuation through a $60 million funding round raised last summer. The company filed an amended Form D on March 12 that showed a total of $68.5 million raised from its Series C round.
The unicorn valuation put Cart.com in rare company, as that term refers to privately held startup valued at $1 billion or more. Many new unicorns were minted in 2021 and 2022, which were frothy times for venture capital deals and startup valuations. However, in 2023 Pitchbook found 43 new companies achieving this valuation in North America, a steep drop from 203 companies in 2022.
Tonar previously said the relocation accompanied Cart.com entering a post-scale phase. The company had gone to Austin to seek software talent but is now looking for logistics talent and what Tonar described as Fortune-type resources.
“Through the pandemic up until maybe last year, a tremendous amount of focus, attention, capital and resources have gone into the front end of commerce,” Tonar said. “But few people have paid attention to the post-purchase part, which is the most important part for the customer. One of the things we hope to extract from having a bigger presence in Houston, which is a logistics hub, is that we’ll get folks with that supply chain experience.”
Cart.com leaders, including co-founder and CEO Omair Tariq, also cited personal ties to Houston as another reason to return.
When the company moved to Austin, Tariq previously said Cart.com aimed to go public in one to three years. Tonar did not confirm any timeline but said that Cart.com's return to Houston would also allow the company to continue its focus on profitability, which it achieved in 2022.
"The mandates of our company have turned towards looking at profitability and cash," Tonar said. "And the culture of Houston is frankly more attuned with that operating model because of the legacy industries here."
