WeGift has raised £4 million in Series A funding led by Fred Destin at Stride.vc, who joins the Board of Directors. Other investors in the round include SAP.iO fund and Unilever Ventures.
The UK-based digital rewards platform also announced new angel investors including James Hind, the founder of Carwow, and Eamon Jubbawy at Onfido.
In 2016, Aron Alexander founded WeGift. The idea came to him after he received a £5 paper voucher refund in the post, he realised that businesses were using outdated systems, failing to leverage digital rewards, incentives, and reimbursements.
Alexander set out to transform the corporate rewards and incentives industry, an industry predicted to be worth almost $700 billion by 2024. WeGift uses a secure, cloud-based API technology platform, allowing businesses to automate sending digital value. The service is on-demand and works in real-time, as a posed to the traditional manual process, which is 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 continued: “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.”
WeGift will use the investment round to fulfil its vision of creating the world’s first real-time infrastructure for digital rewards and incentives. These funds will also be used to scale WeGift’s operations and to support the company’s expansion to the US.
