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Starcart scores €1.4M to become ‘Booking.com of online shopping’

Starcart
Image credits: Starcart

Starcart, a Helsinki-based online store that offers a wide range of products and allows customers to compare its prices, announced that it has secured €1.4M in a Seed funding round led by Inventure. The round also included experienced angel investors, such as serial entrepreneur Ville Vesterinen and Niko Derome, one of the founders of Supercell. 

The investment will enable Starcart to expand its operations in Finland. The company is also planning to expand the team further next year. 

“Starcart’s vision is to do to online shopping what Booking.com has done to travel. Few people go to the websites of hotels and airlines anymore to book trips – they use aggregators. Until now, there haven’t been any aggregators for buying physical goods,” says Starcart’s founder and CEO Pasi Ilola. “Starcart is a globally unique service. No one else has done an app which chooses stores on behalf of the consumer, and even completes the purchases for them.”

According to Statista’s research, online retail sales in 2021 were around $4.9T worldwide. This figure is projected to grow by 50% over the next four years and reach $7.4T by 2025. There are more than 2M different online stores in Europe alone.

Easy way to search and shop

Founded in 2021 by Pasi Ilola, Starcart allows consumers an easy way to search, find and compare the offerings of online stores. 

With Starcart, the consumer automatically finds the best price and fastest delivery for all products. Currently, Starcart’s selection spans from electronics to gardening equipment, with the catalogue expanding constantly.

“The number of online stores and products sold online has exploded, but the customer experience of online shopping has stayed the same since the early 2000s. Buying online is actually getting more difficult because now the consumer has to search for products, compare prices, and place orders in many different stores. With Starcart, the customer can easily find, buy and order the products they want from many different stores, with one shopping cart and one payment. This makes online shopping as easy as it can possibly be”, summarises Ilola.

Inventure

Inventure is one of the most experienced venture capital funds in the Nordics with more than 70 investments, including marketplaces such as ONEio, Wolt, Insurello, and Swappie.

“Starcart has managed to create a functional and unique service of comparing online stores and buying and ordering goods. In a short time, the Starcart team has developed a very impressive solution that utilizes the latest available technologies. Starcart’s team consists of the most experienced developers of digital marketplaces in the Nordics, both on the business side and on the development side. It was an easy decision to join this group as investors”, sums up Inventure’s partner and the round’s main investor Lauri Kokkila.

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