Turning every moment of consumer intent into measurable commerce

Founded: 2016

Initial Valor Investment: Angel Fund (first institutional capital, first VC money in)

Category: AI-driven commerce infrastructure, CPG marketing technology

Why Valor Invested

Valor’s angel fund invested in SmartCommerce in 2016—years before “AI” became common language in marketing and long before commerce-enabled media was a foregone conclusion.

We invested because SmartCommerce was solving a hard, structural problem at the intersection of data, retail, and consumer behavior: how to convert fragmented digital inspiration into actual product purchases—accurately, at scale, and in real time. While much of marketing technology focused on awareness and attribution, SmartCommerce focused on closing the loop between engagement and transaction.

At the time, the founding team brought rare domain depth. Having built and scaled category-defining “where-to-buy” infrastructure at Channel Intelligence (acquired by Google), they understood that CPG brands were uniquely underserved by existing eCommerce tooling. Valor recognized that SmartCommerce was not building a feature—it was building infrastructure for how consumer goods would be discovered and purchased in a distributed digital world.

What SmartCommerce Does

SmartCommerce is an AI- and ML-based data platform that centralizes, normalizes, and optimizes massive volumes of real-time product data—availability, pricing, location, and substitution—across millions of SKUs and hundreds of retailers.

Its flagship Click2Cart® technology makes every digital touchpoint instantly shoppable. Ads, CTV, social media, influencer content, recipes, emails, websites, and even product packaging become direct paths to cart—removing the friction that historically limited online conversion for CPG brands.

Through Click2Cart, SmartCommerce:

• Converts intent into action with one-click add-to-cart experiences

• Connects consumers to real-time, in-stock inventory at preferred retailers

• Eliminates wasted media spend caused by out-of-stock products

• Delivers full-funnel sales and attribution reporting

Today, SmartCommerce powers over $15B in products carted annually, reaches more than 150M consumers each year, and supports a global retail network of 500+ partners, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger, and Walgreens.

Who It Serves

SmartCommerce serves Consumer Packaged Goods manufacturers, their agencies, and retail partners—particularly brands seeking to turn media spend into measurable revenue without increasing budgets.

Its platform is used by virtually all top CPG manufacturers and leading agencies to:

• Commerce-enable retail media, CTV, and influencer campaigns

• Make brand-owned content (recipes, websites, social) directly shoppable

• Recover lost conversions through real-time substitution when products are out of stock

• Measure true incremental lift, ROAS, and new-buyer acquisition

A representative example: In an award-winning CTV campaign with Mondelez, SmartCommerce enabled a 10× increase in conversion rates, a 12% lift in new buyers, and 2× ROAS versus benchmarks—demonstrating how commerce-enabled media can outperform traditional awareness-only approaches.

Momentum Since Valor’s Early Investment

Since Valor was the first institutional capital in SmartCommerce, the company has grown into a category leader with meaningful scale and validation:

• Category adoption: Click2Cart is now embedded across the global CPG ecosystem, driving billions of dollars in carted product annually.

• Platform expansion: SmartCommerce has continuously evolved its data engine to support retail media, full-funnel reporting, and hyper-local product optimization.

• Strategic acquisitions: In 2022, SmartCommerce acquired Myxx and Basketful, expanding into recipe-driven and contextual bundle commerce.

• Growth capital: The company raised a significant growth round led by Argentum Capital Partners, a New York-based growth equity firm specializing in B2B software. Argentum’s continued leadership and board involvement reflect confidence in SmartCommerce’s data-centric moat and long-term trajectory.

As Argentum Managing Partner Walter Barandiarán noted, SmartCommerce stands apart by tackling “the hard part—the data”—bringing rigor and scalability where others focus only on surface-level marketing applications.

Why It Matters

Consumer discovery has fundamentally shifted—from retailer-centric search to a world of distributed inspiration across video, social, influencers, and CTV. SmartCommerce is the connective tissue that makes this new reality work economically for brands and retailers.

By capturing nearly 100% of consumer intent, reducing out-of-stock losses to as low as 0–2%, and turning engagement into measurable sales, SmartCommerce enables CPG brands to grow market share efficiently—even in volatile economic environments.

For Valor, SmartCommerce exemplifies what we aim to back early: founders with deep domain insight, infrastructure-level ambition, and the patience to build defensible platforms before the market fully understands their value.