Commerce · London
Cartwheel
Checkout built for agents doing the buying.
- Stage
- Seed
- Founded
- Founded 2022
- First invested
- We invested 2022
- Team
- 16 people
- Board
- Board seat
- Total raised
- $3.5M
- Current stage
- Seed
- Team
- 16
- Founded
- 2022
What they build
The product, in plain terms
Cartwheel builds checkout built for agents doing the buying. The company started in London in 2022. We backed it at pre-seed and have worked with the team through Seed.
- 01
A merchant-facing product that pays for itself inside a quarter or gets churned.
- 02
Data pulled from the systems merchants already run, so onboarding is a connection rather than a migration.
- 03
Pricing tied to an outcome the merchant can see in their own numbers.
Where it stands
Numbers the team watches
Reported by the company at its most recent board meeting. We publish what founders are comfortable publishing and nothing more.
- Gross merchandise value
- $1M
- Net revenue retention
- 87%
- Time to first value
- 1 days
Why we invested
The note from the first meeting
“We met Cartwheel in 2022, back when merchants changed software rarely, and only when something was visibly broken. What convinced us was not the deck. It was that they answered every hard question with a number and admitted the two they could not answer yet.”
- Turned down an acquisition offer in year two and was right to.
- Rebuilt pricing twice and doubled contract value both times.
- Opened a second market within a year of its seed round.
Founders
Who is building it
Both founders were in the room the day we wrote the check, and both still run the company.
Hana Ito
Co-founder and CEO
Third company. The first one worked and the second one taught more.
Pablo Reyes
Co-founder and CTO
Was the first engineer at a company that scaled straight through this ceiling.
Timeline
How it has gone
The version we would give another investor, including the years where nothing looked like progress.
- 2022
Founded
Hana Ito and Pablo Reyes start Cartwheel in London around a single wedge: checkout built for agents doing the buying.
- 2022
We invested
We wrote the pre-seed check and took a board seat. Marcus Webb has worked with the team ever since.
- 2023
Paid customers
Contracts replaced pilots, and the company stopped selling a roadmap and started selling a product.
- 2024
Seed round
Raised at $22M, led by an investor we introduced during diligence. We took our full pro rata.
- 2026
Where it stands
16 people, selling in more markets than it started in, still run by the two people who wrote the first version.
Alongside us
Co-investors
We share rounds with people we would want on our own cap table.
- Craft Ventures
- Boldstart
- Lux Capital
- Matrix
Working here
Open roles
Cartwheel is hiring in these areas. Mention us and the note gets to the founders directly.
- Merchant success
- Integrations
- Category management
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