Twid, an Indian startup working a rewards primarily based fee platform, has raised $12 million to scale its community of retailers and issuers and broaden its answer within the South Asian market.
Rakuten Capital led the startup’s Sequence A spherical, which additionally noticed participation from Google and present buyers together with Sequoia Surge and Beenext.
Twid permits clients to pay at offline and on-line shops utilizing their present loyalty and reward factors from banks, fintech platforms, and e-commerce web sites. The Bengaluru-based startup’s companions embrace on-line grocer JioMart, pharmacy NetMeds, ticketing platform Yatra and music streamer Gaana.
“The issue has been quite simple and fairly giant throughout the globe, that folks have gotten rewards from a number of locations, however they’ve primarily been very very similar to a locked asset,” stated Amit Koshal, founder and chief government of Twid, in an interview with Fintech.
Koshal based Twid with Rishi Batra and Amit Sharma in 2020 to construct a community impact platform for the plenty. The corporate claims to have amassed over 40 million registered customers.
Twid co-founders Amit Sharma, Amit Koshal, and Rishi Batra (from left to proper)
Twid brings a ‘Pay with Rewards’ possibility that’s out there on the checkout web page of a web-based retailer or at a retailer to let clients redeem their reward factors for his or her purchases. The reward factors, on this case, can come from a listing of issuers, and customers can decide which loyalty program or reward factors they want to redeem.
IndusInd Financial institution, Payback and InterMiles are a number of the key reward level issuers for Twid customers. The platform additionally fetches reward factors from Flipkart to let customers make funds utilizing their SuperCoins — the time period the e-commerce agency makes use of for its loyalty factors.
Twid claims that via its issuer companions, it gives entry to over $1 billion in reward factors pool and has presence throughout over 50,000 retailers.
Koshal instructed Fintech that Twid managed over 5 to eight p.c of the full digital transactions of its service provider companions. The startup has additionally built-in its platform with fee gateways together with PayU, RazorPay and CCAvenue to supply the rewards point-based fee possibility on a number of on-line shops.
“The concept is that we are able to management 80% of all of the redemption that occurs within the nation,” Koshal stated. The manager additionally claimed that retailers are actively integrating Twid’s platform as it’s serving to them purchase clients at a low value — as a substitute of luring them into making purchases after giving reductions or cashbacks.
“We give lots of intelligence again to our companions; what are the sorts of classes which are doing good, what’s the common order worth that now we have elevated for you, what number of transactions per buyer that we’re rising for you,” Koshal stated, including, “Equally, from an issuer perspective, the issuer has good readability as a result of it’s their factors getting used.”
Twid additionally helps its issuer companions positive tune their choices by sharing which reward factors are making quick inroads with clients.
“After we are built-in with all these issuers, now we have entry to over 300 million clients from them,” he stated.
Twid exhibits a ‘Pay with Rewards’ choice to let customers pay utilizing their reward factors
Twid plans to make use of the contemporary funds to develop its community and go deeper into the enterprise, Koshal instructed Fintech. “The second is that we need to construct an amazing moonshot expertise crew. So, we’re rising in all departments,” he stated. The corporate at present has a headcount of 42 individuals.
The manager famous that there are plans to bolster the expertise and “make investments loads” in knowledge science. Rakuten India CEO Sunil Gopinath is becoming a member of the Twid board of administrators on behalf of Rakuten Capital.
“Rakuten Capital sees super potential and future synergies on this funding. Given our world membership merchandise are developed right here in Bengaluru by Rakuten India, I’m thrilled to affix the Twid board of administrators and sit up for working with Amit Koshal, Rishi Batra, Amit Sharma and their very succesful crew to rework the way in which reward factors are considered and utilized in India,” Gopinath stated in a ready assertion.
Twid plans to leverage Rakuten’s experience in reward factors to reinforce its platform.
“No matter their [Rakuten’s] experience is, from the form of merchandise, platforms and so on, they’ve constructed, the talent that they’ve achieved, these are the learnings that we might be inculcating from them to construct a really sturdy enterprise in India to start with,” Koshal instructed Fintech.
In an announcement to Fintech, Rakuten Capital stated that it noticed an enormous market potential for Indian-based rewards enterprise alternatives, and Twid was nicely positioned to make the most of this chance to construct and scale its enterprise mannequin.
“We’re additionally trying ahead to make out there our tech expertise at Rakuten India who has been constructing Rakuten Group’s world reward program platforms to assist Twid with creating best-in-class options for India,” the company enterprise capital arm of the Japanese firm stated.
In parallel with Rakuten, Google’s addition is predicted to assist Twid broaden its mannequin of enabling clients to make purchases utilizing their a number of reward factors.
“Google has an extended historical past of investing in early-stage startups throughout quite a lot of industries. And we’re very excited to collaborate with credible gamers like them within the journey,” Koshal stated.
In July final 12 months, Twid raised $2.5 million in funding led by Beenext and Sequoia’s Surge. “What we preferred after we met the crew and what stood out to us is that somewhat than constructing out a closed loop system, they tried to make this factor fungible and create an open loop system,” Hero Choudhary, Managing Accomplice, Beenext, instructed Fintech, whereas describing what made the Singaporean enterprise capital agency to assist Twid since its early stage.