Just the Beginning: Carted’s $10m Funding Round

We have closed our USD$10m funding round for Carted! Yes, I know what you’re thinking… It’s huge!

I’ve previously bootstrapped another software business, and although it continues to grow organically, having the resources to grow as quickly as you want is definitely a change and one that I am so excited about. 🚀

No matter how much you believe in your product or idea, there’s nothing like having the backing of some of the most respected names in the industry believe in it too.

I am proud to announce our latest funding round is led by Blackbird VC. I feel forever grateful to be given the opportunity to build our vision of the future of commerce with amazing investors alongside us including Tidal Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, Grok Ventures, and experienced individuals, as well as continued support from our pre-seed investors; Google Drive Co-founder David Wurtz, Ten13, and others.

We share a common belief that commerce is fundamentally changing. People being largely confined to their homes for over a year around the world has put a floodlight on how far behind eCommerce is where it should be.

How it started

When I started the company last year in San Francisco, we began by building software for brands and influencers to create shoppable video content (primarily TikTok).

Every influencer was using affiliate links to tag products in their TikTok videos and redirecting their users away from their content to a product page with a ton of pop-ups, distractions, and different user experiences.

We wanted a multi-brand checkout in one solution but that meant integrating with millions of merchants one by one.

I really thought that there had to be a better way to integrate commerce into content and empower all the other founders, creators, developers, and product managers who were also building new commerce experiences — not just build the tech for us (which we called UCAPI internally, meaning Universal Commerce API).

Why are we doing this?

We’re on a mission to build solutions for the next generation of commerce. Commerce doesn’t have to be complicated, ultimately we are about empowering developers and platforms to make commerce seamless by connecting them to millions of merchants and billions of products with a single API.

As Wendell Keuneman, General Partner Tidal Ventures put it:

“By building the infrastructure to transact contextually within any experience, Carted will shift the paradigm of what a store is, and who a merchant can be.”

Where it’s going

We have a massive opportunity at Carted to fundamentally change the way commerce is conducted across the internet and be able to turn content platforms into commerce platforms.

We are excited to grow the team both in Australia and the US, as well as remotely.

We are also fortunate to have Michael Tolo from Blackbird, join our board:

“Carted has all attributes that we look for at Blackbird: it is bold, ambitious, and consequential on a global scale. They deeply understand the problem and their customers, because they are their customers.

“The ability to sell any product from any merchant on any content platform through direct checkout fundamentally changes the way we activate commerce through online content and communities, enabling the first generation of digital-native experiential commerce. This is not about incrementally improving eCommerce, it is about building the infrastructure to embed commerce within the online experiences that mean the most to us.”

A huge thank you to Andrey Shirben, Blackbird, Chris Dean, David Wurtz, Grok Ventures, Harrison Uffindell, Jade Wang, Kamran Ansari, Le’ora Lichtenstein, Lolita Taub, Matta & Aprill Allen, Michael Tolo, Ryan Hudson, Stewart Glynn, Stuart Hall, Streamlined Ventures, Ten13, Tidal Ventures, V1VC and Wendell Keuneman for believing in us (in alphabetical order).

And of course a huge thank you to our early team members Chad, Miroslav and Mykola, and Taylor for taking the leap to help build Carted. And to Emyle, Shile, and Simon for helping me when needed!

I am excited to have you all along on the journey. 🎉

To anyone who wants to join us, we are hiring engineers, design, product, and (soon) dev relations and marketing.

For more coverage on our announcement click here. Or read the investment notes from Blackbird here and Tidal Ventures here.

Now back to building… 👩🏼‍💻