Online shopping is not like it used to be. People don’t go to marketplace websites to browse, but often have a specific product in mind. SamCart 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 TTV Capital. Fin VC and George Kaiser Foundation also participated in the round. SamCart has now raised a total of $13 million since the company was co-founded by Brian Moran and his brother, Scott Moran, in 2014. That included a small seed round in November 2019, Brian Moran, CEO, told Crunchbase News.
“We were running a digital-product brand selling online courses and e-books that turned into an online marketing company teaching businesses how to grow,” Moran said. “We 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.”
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.
“The opportunity now is so big,” he added. “We felt that we could be the next platform that has all of these brands, like Ring and Peloton, if we raised money.”
Next up, the company will continue to support customers and get in position to go after a Series B.
Sean Banks, partner at TTV Capital, which also led SamCart’s 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.
“For 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’t at the forefront,” Banks said. “The team has a deep understanding of those pain points and how to navigate the waters to push products out there.”
Illustration: iStock
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