Digital rewards platform WeGift has secured £4 million in Series A funding led by Fred Destin at Stride.vc, who also joins the Board of Directors, and other investors including SAP.iO fund and Unilever Ventures.
WeGift also announced new angel investors including James Hind, founder of Carwow, and Eamon Jubbawy at Onfido.
WeGift was founded in 2016 by Aron Alexander after he received a £5 paper voucher refund in the post and realised that businesses were failing to leverage digital rewards, incentives, and reimbursements.
The corporate rewards and incentives industry will be worth almost $700 billion by 2024 and WeGift is on a mission to transform it. Using a secure, cloud-based, open API technology platform, businesses are able to automate sending digital value, on-demand and in real-time rather than using manual processes that are error prone and expensive.
Founder and CEO Aron Alexander said: “Historically businesses had to wait weeks to purchase and distribute digital rewards, using Excel spreadsheets.
“WeGift helps companies intelligently automate this process to power new acquisition and retention opportunities. We give them instant access to a huge choice of rewards and payouts, an ever-growing network of more than 500 brand partners, across 26 markets and 20 currencies, in real-time.
He added: “We are disrupting a broken market on a global scale, and this investment, together with our partnerships with Unilever Ventures, SAP.iO Fund and Stride.vc, is an instrumental step forward in achieving our vision.”
Ian Lane at Unilever Ventures said: “Our fund seeks out the most transformative technologies that have a potential to significantly impact supply chains and customer experience. In WeGift we see a huge opportunity to leverage their technology across the consumer goods industry.”
The investment round will help WeGift deliver on its vision of creating the world’s first real-time infrastructure for digital rewards and incentives. The funds will be used to further scale WeGift’s operations, as well as to support the company’s expansion to the US, and for further investment in its technology platform.