Actress takes her Los Angeles startup Klickly east

An e-commerce technology company based in Los Angeles has opened an office in North Carolina — with plans to hire.

Payments platform Klickly recently opened an East Coast headquarters between Durham and Hillsborough — near where its founder, actress turned entrepreneur Cooper Harris, grew up. Right now, the office has fewer than 20 employees, Harris said, but the plan is to triple, even quadruple the number in the coming months.

While it’s convenient to Harris — who still has family in the area — the main reason for the local office is to recruit, she said. Klickly is hiring across the board, from sales to operations to customer success, Harris said.

Harris grew up in a tech-savvy household. She's the daughter of a serial entrepreneur and a nonprofit director, and the sister of a full stack engineer.

But she didn’t envision life behind a computer screen.

She wanted to be an actor. Accepted for high school at North Carolina School for the Arts, she worked to accomplish her dream — and followed it to New York and then Los Angeles. She took on roles at shows such as "The Young and the Restless" and "As the World Turns." But the tech in her DNA just didn’t go away.

“I was young and I definitely got restless,” she said. So she started coding — and participating in hackathons, 24- to 38-hour competitions were groups of people come together to build “really cool” technology.

Harris describes herself as a “bad coder, a really bad coder.” Her expertise is more in the ideation phase.

Klickly is her third company. It started from a problem. She'd been on her phone trying to buy a pair of shoes and got frustrated at the “experience of finding them, liking them and trying to buy them.”

“Could we use AI to make that a much more palatable, streamlined experience?” she recalls thinking.

So Klickly was formed to tap into AI to show “the right things to the right person at the right time” and facilitate payment. The company has about 2,000 clients and big name backers with firms such as Google, Stripe and Warby Parker.

Klickly has raised “millions” in outside capital and is profitable, Harris said — though she declined to provide specific financial details about the company.