Austin's fast-growing e-commerce firm Cart.com grabs $240M for growth
Fast-growing e-commerce services provider Cart.com — which recently moved its headquarters from Houston to Austin — has raised $240 million for expansion.
Legacy Knight Capital Partners led the equity round with participation from Citi Ventures, Visa, and other Fortune 100 brands. J.P. Morgan and TriplePoint Capital provided the venture debt financing. When combined with prior funding rounds, Cart.com has now secured $380 million to date.
Cart.com currently employs 150 people in Austin and executives say they plan to hire at least 150 more workers here in the next 12 months.
The company, which competes with e-commerce giant Amazon and other platforms, was recently named Capital Factory's Startup of the Year and has experienced a year of expansion and investment after its launch in November 2020.
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From its original base in Houston, Cart.com developed a suite of software and services it says brings all the commerce functions needed to grow a business online.
The company provides brands of any size with online store software, digital marketing, delivery fulfillment and financial services as well as analytics of sales and marketing performance.
Cart.com says it offers an alternative sales channel to Amazon, which takes an average cut of 20% of revenues to sell on its marketplace.
Over the past 12 months, Cart.com has acquired nine companies and launched nine fulfillment centers. Cart.com has more than 400 employees and said it plans to grow its total headcount to 1,000 by the first quarter of 2022.
Many of Cart.com's customers are small businesses with little or no e-commerce expertise. Larger customers Haymaker Coffee Co., Pathway Homes and Guess.
When Cart.com announced its headquarters move, CEO Omair Tariq said, "There's no better place than Austin for a brand-obsessed company like Cart.com to plant its flag as we reimagine e-commerce and drive growth for today's top merchants."
Tariq was an early employee at Houston-based Blinds.com and became its chief operating officer before Home Depot acquired it in 2014. He co-founded Cart.com with Jim Jacobsen, former CEO of outdoor gear retailer RTIC Outdoors.
The company said its new headquarters will be in downtown Austin at 612 Brazos St. It is currently hiring across engineering, finance and accounting, information security, information technology, marketing, human resources, product management and sales.
“With this new funding we’re poised to continue our strategy of acquiring top providers from across the e-commerce value chain, while staying hyper-focused on meeting the evolving needs of the brands we serve," Tariq said.
Cart.com's move to Austin came as a number of corporate giants have relocated their headquarters to Austin. In October, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the electric automaker — one of the world's best-known and most valuable companies — would move its corporate headquarters from California to Austin.
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Tesla's news came less than a year after software giant Oracle announced in 2020 that it was moving its corporate headquarters from California to Austin.
A number of other technology giants — including Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon — have recently expanded their operations in Central Texas.
Meanwhile, Samsung has announced plans for a $17 billion chip manufacturing facility in Taylor.
The Cart.com deal is among a number of funding deals for Austin companies early in 2022.
Artificial intelligence company SparkCognition last month raised $123 million in its latest funding round, which values it at more than $1.4 billion.
That followed an announcement that Wheel, a health technology startup that offers a variety of virtual care tools, raised $150 million to continue its growth.
Meanwhile, Atmosphere said it has raised $100 million to grow its streaming entertainment service. The startup, a Chive Media Group spinoff, said it planned to hire hundreds of new employees with the help of the funding.
In addition, bootmaker Tecovas raised $56 million to expand its brand. The company, which started as an online seller of handmade boots, is looking to grow by adding five to seven new retail stores, and expanding its offerings to include apparel, accessories and other footwear. The company already owns 20 stores in 10 states, including a South Congress Avenue location in Austin.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin's fast-growing e-commerce company raises $240M for growth
