Curbside Launches New Way for Shoppers to Find, Buy and Pick Up Products at Local Stores Including Target

–Curbside, a new company reinventing the local shopping experience, launched the Curbside mobile commerce app today available for free download through the Apple App Store for iOS and Google Play for Android devices. Just in time for the hectic holiday season, Curbside makes finding, buying and getting the things shoppers need from their favorite local stores faster and easier than ever before – it’s a new way to shop, built for the era of “Get It Now” commerce.

“At Target, we are always looking for new ways to improve the shopping experience”

Curbside is designed to be mobile from the ground up and offers a better buying and better getting experience for shoppers:

• It’s a one-stop destination app that allows shoppers to find the products that are in stock at multiple local stores and check out with a single tap.
• The service is free, the app is free, and Curbside does not mark up store prices.
• It’s optimized for shopping on a small screen – not a retrofit desktop e-commerce experience. It allows consumers to shop with one card securely on file.
• Shoppers can shop hundreds of thousands of items, available at local stores, any time and pick it up at the location they want, all without having to find items on shelves or wait in checkout lines. At Store Pickup locations the shopper’s order is still ready and waiting inside. At Curbside Pickup locations shoppers can get what they need without having to park or get out of their car, and Curbside’s unique location capabilities notify the staff that shoppers are approaching so their items are ready.

“With more speed and convenience than home delivery, Curbside is the perfect solution for today’s mobile, on-the-go consumers,” said co-founder and CEO Jaron Waldman. “We see a great opportunity to help a busy parent or someone on their way home from work to conveniently get what they want from their favorite nearby stores.”

Following a beta test in the San Jose, Calif. area, Curbside is now available to the greater San Francisco Bay Area, with plans to expand to other markets in the coming months. It is currently available at 10 select Target stores throughout the Bay Area, including the Metreon and Geary St. locations in San Francisco. Curbside is also available at the Westfield’s Oakridge shopping center in San Jose, where Curbside will serve a number of retailers from a single pickup location.

“At Target, we are always looking for new ways to improve the shopping experience,” said Casey Carl, Target’s president of Omnichannel. “We’re excited to see how our Bay Area guests respond to the Curbside service, which provides an extremely convenient way for guests to get what they need on those days when every moment counts.”

Curbside has received a total of $9.5M in funding, including an $8M Series A round led by Index Ventures. Other investors include Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Chicago Ventures, TenOneTen, WGI Group, and select individuals including former Yahoo! President and current Costco board member Sue Decker and former Visa president and CEO Carl F. Pascarella.

“Location-based shopping is the future of mobile commerce, and Curbside is at the forefront of it,” said Jerry Yang, founding partner, AME Cloud Ventures, and co-founder of Yahoo! “The Curbside founders are successful entrepreneurs, who each have sold their companies to Apple. They have now assembled a talented team that has developed a fast and convenient experience around location-based product search. It is mobile commerce done right and it will change the way people shop.”

“In today’s mobile-first world, Curbside is on path to deliver the next generation of commerce,” said Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures. “By focusing on mobile and local, Curbside is tackling immense complexity to bring consumers the simplest and most convenient way to access products from merchants in their community. We couldn’t be more proud to back co-founders Jaron Waldman, Denis Laprise and the rest of the Curbside team, and look forward to supporting them as they deliver on their mission.”

About Curbside
Curbside is reinventing the local shopping experience by making it faster and easier for consumers to find, buy and pick up products at local stores than ever before, with no markup in price. Curbside’s technology allows it to accurately represent retailers’ inventory and reliably alert local stores when customers approach. Curbside was co-founded by Jaron Waldman, who founded Placebase which was later sold to Apple, and Denis Laprise, who founded Poly9 which was also acquired by Apple. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. Curbside is free to download from the Apple App Store or Google Play, or by visiting www.shopcurbside.com.