FinTech News
Claim App Announces $4 Million Seed Round
A FinTech that combines cashback and social media has raised a new round of funding.
About the round:
Startup Claim has announced that it raised $4 million. The seed round was led by Sequoia Capital and joins a previously unannounced $2 million pre-seed round led by Susa Ventures and BoxGroup. Other Claim investors include 6th Man Venture, Reflexive Capital, A* Capital, GSW Ventures, The Kraft Group, Theia, Luke deWilde, and others. With the funds, the startup plans to expand its engineering team as well as bring the app to more people.
About Claim:
Claim has been described as a social network for rewards. According to a blog post from the startup, users can earn cashback and redeem rewards together. As Claim explains, user profiles are populated by transactions on their linked credit cards. The app also notes that customers can send rewards from brands you love to friends, allowing them to try it out. Additionally, Drops are new rewards that users can then decide to redeem, trade, or gift.
Currently, Claim is only available via a private beta. However, they plan to expand to users across the United States in 2024.
What they’re saying:
In an interview with TechCrunch, Claim CTO Tap Stephenson said, “We started Claim because we were really interested in what it meant to own something online. We saw this in web3 and we see this in sports, which is in collectibles. There’s always been places where you can own something online, but there was no generalized form of it. And so we started asking: What would it mean to remove all friction to actually owning something online? And that over time, led to Claim.”
As for how brands can benefit from Claim, CEO Sam Obletz noted, “We make it so much easier for marketers. We can find customers based on where they shop and where their friends shop. If they haven’t gone before we can give them a reward to try their brand for the first time, which is super critical because we’re bringing in real new customers, and we can show them how effective that reward was based on spend.”
My thoughts:
Reading Claim’s blog post and looking over its site, the are definitely some interesting ideas at play. Then again, there may also be some privacy concerns regarding transaction data — but that ship pretty much sailed with Venmo, didn’t it?
Anyway, while Claim has apparently found success in beta and has attracted investment, I’m not sure how well the service will scale. It’s true that the app seems like a great marketing tool for smaller brands, but I’m not sure how many larger entities will want to participate. Of course, I’m no expert and I haven’t had a chance to check out Claim’s platform first-hand. Hopefully that will change in 2024 as the app’s expansion continues.
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