附近上门

Online shopping is not like it used to be. People don鈥檛 go to marketplace websites to browse, but often have a specific product in mind. aims to be an e-commerce platform designed for direct-to-consumer brands.

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The company, headquartered in Austin with an office in Washington, D.C., raised $10 million in Series A funding led by . and also participated in the round. SamCart has now raised a total of $13 million since the company was co-founded by and his brother, , in 2014. That included a small seed round in November 2019, Brian Moran, CEO, told 附近上门 News.

鈥淲e were running a digital-product brand selling online courses and e-books that turned into an online marketing company teaching businesses how to grow,鈥� Moran said. 鈥淲e had built up a company that was bringing in a couple of million a year, but we were frustrated with the e-commerce options. E-commerce now runs on selling products, not brands.鈥�

SamCart provides a way for brands to create websites, for as little as $49 per month, that showcase their products, convert visitors into customers, and increase the value of each purchase without the need for marketing expertise or large storefront websites. The company is targeting businesses bringing in $100,000 to $50 million in revenue per year, Moran said.

The Series A will enable the company to invest in marketing efforts, as well as build out its team in Austin and Washington, D.C., with a focus on customer support, market, go-to-market and product engineers, Moran said.

The Morans had bootstrapped their company for four years before its first funding in 2019. They had been able to get to 4,000 customers before funding, but wanted to scale. After experiencing high double-digit growth in 2020, SamCart closed the year with more than 14,000 customers and over half a billion dollars in sales processed, Moran said.

鈥淭he opportunity now is so big,鈥� he added. 鈥淲e felt that we could be the next platform that has all of these brands, like and , if we raised money.鈥�

Next up, the company will continue to support customers and get in position to go after a Series B.

, partner at TTV Capital, which also led SamCart鈥檚 seed round, said in an interview that the global pandemic accelerated the change in e-commerce, and SamCart has developed new ways to engage in commerce that is not in person.

He also liked the way Moran and his team was building a platform that is the next iteration of the checkout around embedded commerce.

鈥淔or a long time we were looking at a soup-to-nuts version of the shopping cart, but if you had a product you wanted to sell, you had to market that product through channels where the shopping cart wasn鈥檛 at the forefront,鈥� Banks said. 鈥淭he team has a deep understanding of those pain points and how to navigate the waters to push products out there.鈥�

Illustration: iStock