Cosmic
Leading commerce gateway providing retailers with the ability to sell anywhere.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
| investor | €0.0 | round | |
| N/A | €0.0 | round | |
N/A | Acquisition | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
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Cosmic Cart, founded in 2011 by Alex Adelman, Matt Senter, and Pearson Cunningham, emerged as a middleware solution designed to streamline the online shopping experience. The company's genesis traces back to Adelman's frustrating attempt at Christmas shopping, which highlighted the inefficiency of managing multiple checkouts across various retail sites. This personal pain point led to the creation of a universal shopping cart.
The firm operated on a B2B2C model, positioning itself as an intermediary between online retailers and digital publishers, such as fashion bloggers. Retailers would integrate their inventory via APIs, allowing publishers to tag products directly within their content. For consumers, this translated into a seamless purchasing journey; they could add items from numerous websites into a single cart and complete the transaction without ever navigating away from the content they were browsing. This addressed the critical e-commerce issue of shopping cart abandonment, which plagued the industry with rates around 74%. Cosmic Cart's revenue model was tied to enabling sales for retailers and providing a monetization tool for publishers.
A significant milestone in the company's trajectory was its participation in a Target accelerator program, where the team worked from Target's headquarters and gained access to valuable industry networks. This partnership with a major retailer provided substantial validation for their model. The company successfully raised $260,000 in a seed funding round in August 2013, with investors including Dundee Venture Capital and HDS Capital. Ultimately, Cosmic Cart's journey culminated in being acqui-hired by PopSugar in October 2015, marking its exit from the market as an independent entity.
Keywords: universal shopping cart, e-commerce middleware, affiliate marketing, content monetization, shopping cart abandonment, contextual commerce, online retail solution, publisher tools, multi-vendor checkout, digital advertising analytics, Alex Adelman, Matt Senter, PopSugar acquisition, Target accelerator, e-commerce API, online checkout, fashion tech, retail technology, embedded commerce, shoppable content