SamCart, an Austin-based startup that claims to have created the first e-commerce platform made specifically for direct-to-consumer brands, announced Thursday it closed on a $10 million Series A. The round was led by TTV Capital, with participation from Fin VC and the George Kaiser Foundation, and brings the company’s total funding raised to $13 million.
Before co-founding SamCart together, brothers Brian and Scott Moran were running a successful digital product company, selling online courses and e-books in various niche areas like baseball. However, Brian Moran told Built In in an interview that they grew frustrated because they couldn’t find any e-commerce platforms for their kind of direct-to-consumer business. So, they decided to make one for themselves.
SamCart was made for D2C businesses with a small catalog of flagship products — think Casper or Peloton. Instead of encouraging consumers to browse through hundreds of products, these companies want customers to come to their site knowing what they want. Their site is built around the individual products. SamCart provides them tools to create sites that showcase those products and increase the value of each purchase.
“You really need to hyper-focus on making sure that product gets all the love that it needs so that you can drive sales, increase conversions, maximize average order value — all the things that are kind of in our sweet spot,” Moran said. “The difference [with SamCart] is that it’s more product focused, not storefront or brand focused.”
A key concept for SamCart is democratization, to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to boost their sales no matter their funding or experience level. Moran says it’s important to him to maintain that ethos because it’s their backstory. His previous digital product company was SamCart’s first customer, and SamCart uses SamCart to sell itself.
“A lot of people aren’t fortunate enough to go raise money or they don’t want to, so they’re really putting their own money, blood, sweat and tears into their business and trying to get it off the ground,” Moran said. “Whatever we can do to empower the entrepreneurs and businesses that use our platform, you know, that’s what we love doing.”
This is SamCart’s second round of funding since being founded in 2014. Moran says the company was bootstrapped for its first four or five years, then raised a $3 million seed round in 2019, which was also led by TTV Capital.
“They saw how e-commerce was exploding and how we were really positioned to help a whole lot of people with a unique way of looking at how e-commerce works. So we said, hey, let’s step on the gas and go down this fundraise route,” Moran said.
Indeed, Sean Banks, a partner at TTV Capital, says D2C commerce grew as much as 6x the rate of overall e-commerce from 2016 to 2019. Then, when the pandemic hit, the industry grew even more, giving SamCart an opportunity to dominate the space.
“When COVID-19 added fuel to direct-to-consumer commerce growth, SamCart’s e-commerce model was a unique match for what entrepreneurs needed to best reach customers during that time,” Banks said in a statement.
As a result, the pandemic added “fuel to the fire” in terms of SamCart’s growth, according to Moran. The company says it closed out 2020 with more than 14,000 customers and more than half a billion dollars in sales processed.
“Sign-ups exploded for us. Our biggest struggle was, honestly, keeping up,” Moran said. “New user acquisition exploded. And for the customers that we already acquired, their sales really took off. Essentially every major metric turned even more upward.”
To keep up, Moran says the company will use this fresh funding to increase its marketing efforts and grow its team, with plans to add another 50 to 60 people to its 40-person team in the next year. About 40 of those new hires will be at SamCart’s Austin headquarters, while the rest will be based out of its Washington, D.C., office.
“Seeing businesses on our platform, with some coming in from almost nothing and turning their businesses into seven-figure, eight-figure businesses is what we live for,” Moran said. “This amount of money in the bank just opens up a whole new world that wasn’t available to us in those first couple of years. As good as those first couple years went, it’s exciting to think about what we’re going to be able to do with this new team and funding around us.”
