Image: WeGift
WeGift plans to use its latest investment to deliver the ‘world’s first real-time infrastructure for digital rewards and incentives’.
In 2016, Aron Alexander received a £5 paper voucher refund in the post and was surprised to learn that companies were still distributing physical vouchers for reimbursement in this day and age. He then realised that businesses were failing to leverage the ability to conveniently exchange digital rewards, incentives and reimbursements online.
It was this moment that led him to set up his company, WeGift. Three years later, WeGift operates in more than 26 countries and has more than 500 brand partners as well as a client list including Coinbase, Halfords and New Look. The corporate rewards and incentives industry will be worth almost $700bn by 2024, according to Incentive and Motivation.
When Alexander did some more research into this, he discovered that “businesses rely largely on archaic, manual processes for rewards”. Expanding on this point, he 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. We are disrupting a broken market on a global scale.”
WeGift said it wants to transform this industry “using a secure, cloud-based, open API technology platform [so that] 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”.
On Thursday (27 June) WeGift announced that it had secured £4m in funding from Fred Destin (of Stride.vc), who will join the company’s board of directors, alongside investors such as Unilever Ventures and SAP.iO. WeGift also announced new angel investors including Carwow founder James Hind and Onfido’s Eamon Jubbawy.
WeGift said this investment round will go towards delivering the company’s vision of creating the “world’s first real-time infrastructure for digital rewards and incentives”. A WeGift press release stated: “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 future investment in its technology platform.”
Ian Lane of Unilever Ventures said there is “a huge opportunity to leverage this technology across the consumer goods industry”.
