New funding from Elevator Ventures, RBI`s investment arm, to accelerate SME digitization in CEE

CloudCart, an all-in-one e-commerce platform for SMEs headquartered in Bulgaria, has successfully raised additional funding from a new investor, Elevator Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI). Elevator Ventures joins the existing investor NV3, who also contributed with financing in this round. Proceeds of the new funding will be used to invest in the growth of the company, including tech development and expansion to new geographies in Central & Eastern Europe.

CloudCart offers easy-to-use software to automate the creation of eCommerce shops, as well as a complete ecosystem of supporting tools and services localized for each market to cover all daily operational needs of small- and medium-sized businesses. CloudCart creates value to online SME merchants by helping them focus on what they do best: creating and selling their products and services online – while CloudCart provides the infrastructure and value-add services to help them scale their business. Having originally started its activities on the Bulgarian market, CloudCart achieved 3.5 million orders from the e-Stores operating through the platform, over 34.5 million unique clients, and a total of 140 million EUR turnover made by CloudCart’s merchants.

CloudCart`s vision is to change the way eCommerce is carried out daily. Therefore, its focus has been on creating a future-proof eCommerce infrastructure stack. This includes building secure scalable software, which is nonetheless flexible enough to support specific customer needs. CloudCart enables this by combining the best of two worlds, open-source and SaaS, and emerging as a next-level Open SaaS player. Instead of being limited to out-of-the-box software solutions, CloudCart created a more open system that enables various 3rd party service providers, such as web studios, agencies, designers, and developers, to build on top of the core e-commerce platform. The software company is building on the trend for greater personalization of services, which, it believes, will become even more pronounced in the future. With this view, CloudCart makes it possible to personalize the entire e-store, according to buyers’ consumer behavior.

“What stood out to us was the deep understanding of CloudCart of the unique needs and pain points of SME merchants, which drives the passion to address them. We are excited about the continued momentum of eCommerce growth in the CEE region and believe that Nikolay Iliev   (CEO) and his team are ideally positioned to capture it”, says Maximilian Schausberger, Managing Director of Elevator Ventures.

“We are extremely proud that none other than Elevator Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI), is backing CloudCart. I believe that together we can take European eCommerce to the next evolutionary level. CloudCart’s technological integrations and the partnerships we have mustered with strategic market players such as Elevator Ventures present us with the real opportunity to achieve just that. We have always had the technology and expertise to help businesses with their eCommerce needs, but with the changes coming to eCommerce with each passing day, this opens a lot more cross-border growth opportunities for all of us.” shares the Co-founder & CEO of CloudCart – Mr. Nikolay Iliev.