According to Dealroom, today there are 1,407 active startups in Bulgaria. If you look at the pedigree of these companies, you’ll see certain trends. A growing number are young people in their twenties, who grew up with the idea of entrepreneurship and startups, and are confident about starting out for themselves without too much prior baggage. Another, probably still biggest group, are people who already worked for 5-10-20 years in corporations or other startups, and gained skills and ideas about how to do things differently. But there is also a small, but very powerful group of companies, which were founded by people, who also have 20 years of experience, but who have always been doing their own startups. These are the pioneers of the Bulgarian (and not only) internet industry, and very often it’s their new companies that are the most sticky with investors and intriguing to follow.
Bulgaria, like every country, has its own vintage of digital industry pioneers. The people who built the first internet providers, the first media websites, the first video streaming services. Some of that experience was also international. Bulgaria started becoming a notable tech outsourcing destination in the 1990s, and became a very big one in the 2000s, so many of the internet entrepreneurs of that time also built some of the systems behind the biggest global internet success stories of the 1990s and 2000s.
Such is also the story of CloudCart, where we invested with Vitosha late last year. Brothers Nikolay and Peter Iliev first started out in 2002, making 360-degree virtual tour visualizations for hotel websites. After that, they were one of the first companies to offer CD-ROM cutout digital business cards (remember those?!), and started a digital agency that became one of the top players in Bulgaria. In 2008, they started their first e-commerce project, a digital mall as they called it, at a time when large international retailers still hadn’t entered the local market. That website allowed people in Bulgaria to order brand items that were then wholesale ordered and shipped from abroad.
By 2011, based on that initial ecommerce experience, the original idea behind what was to become CloudCart first formed. Building a platform that would allow anyone to launch a professional webshop, plug and play, with as little as possible technical effort and a high degree of localization. After spending a few years on the backburner, while the brother duo wound down several previous businesses, CloudCart officially launched in 2016.
“It took us a bit longer than we hoped for'', chuckles Nikolay as we sit in the boardroom of the company’s spacious office in the Mladost district of Sofia, right at the foot of Vitosha mountain, and with breathtaking views from the 6th floor windows, overlooking the mountain to one side, and the entire city to the other. “We were actually ready to launch the company in 2014, but by that time we had decided on the name, and it took us two more years to negotiate with the owners of the CloudCart.com domain”, he adds.
Today, as Nikolay and I sit down in the CloudCart board room, we’re having cake, because it happens to be its birthday; exactly eight years to the day after the launch of CloudCart in April 2016. With a team of 60 and offices in Bulgaria and Germany, and soon also in the US, the company is blasting ahead. In its first four years, CloudCart became a leader on the domestic market for e-commerce stores in Bulgaria, and in 2020 it secured its first VC investment and started operating internationally.
“Today, more than one in three Bulgarians have checked out an online shopping cart on CloudCart systems, and our gross turnover has surpassed EUR 350 million”, says Nikolay. “But that’s just the start”, he adds.
According to Nikolay and CloudCart, the future of online shopping will be contextual, AI driven, and not centered around a graphical user interface. “We are already heavily implementing AI, our engine is the most sophisticated tool globally for recognizing products that our clients put up for sale, and generating product descriptions and other data related to the product”, he adds. “But in the future, you won’t be browsing stores online. You’ll make voice notes while you’re driving or working out, and when you get home, the products you wanted will have been delivered”.
As Nikolay points out, CloudCart’s biggest competitor is Shopify. “They’re the huge no.1 player worldwide, and they have built this fantastic platform around developers and developer communities. We see however that we’re beating them in the markets where we’re active, because our product is far superior in terms of usability and localization”. While Shopify is like Unix or Linux, where you can run anything as long as you build it and implement it, CloudCart is like Apple; it just works very well. “Our aim is to be the best ecommerce platform, as a one-stop-shop, without any need for technical implementation or even hosting”, says Nikolay.
After more than twenty years in the business, and having taken CloudCart to where it is today, Nikolay says that the next several years will be defining for the company. “In Bulgaria, we have become the undisputed leader in the sector, and now our aim is to do the same in much bigger markets. We are starting out in Germany, where Shopify has 25% of the market, and our goal is to get at least as much”, he summarizes. “After that, more and even bigger markets, until we become a globally relevant player in ecommerce”.
It is that level of dedication and ambition that not only made a huge impression on us at Vitosha, but that is characteristic for industry pioneers. What started out with website cloning and local small-time online properties, has grown and developed into a company with a vision, culture, traction, and focus to define the digital industry globally. Keep an eye out on CloudCart, this company is going places.