Wildfire Systems Inc., an innovative financial technology platform that powers reward and loyalty programs, today announced it has secured $15 million in Series A venture capital investment co-led by TTV Capital and QED Investors.
New investors include B Capital, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, and Daher Capital, which are joined by existing investors including Mucker Capital, Bonfire Ventures, Moonshots Capital, and BAM Ventures.
Wildfire® will leverage the funding to expand the launch of its new white-label monetization platform that allows enterprise partners to embed social commerce, rewards, and cashback offers into existing customer journeys. Not only does Wildfire drive incremental revenue for merchants, it enables enterprise partners to earn revenue from organic, everyday purchases and social sharing, while boosting customer retention, and loyalty.
Wildfire’s versatile platform helps partners across a full spectrum of verticals, such as financial institutions, search engines, browsers, rewards services, telecom providers and device OEMs. Wildfire’s impressive list of partners includes Acorns and Microsoft. Microsoft has integrated Wildfire coupons and cashback within the Edge browser and Bing search engine to empower people to make confident purchasing decisions, saving them both time and money.
Wildfire powers Acorns’ white-label desktop extension for Acorns Earn, its unparalleled rewards program that allows customers to earn money from over 12,000 brands when they shop.
“Wildfire has been a valuable partner in supporting the growth of Acorns Earn,’’ said Babak Farrokh-Siar, Vice President, Head of National Business Development for Acorns. “Their technology and commerce platform has expanded the ways our customers can earn money for their future when they shop.”
Wildfire founder and CEO Jordan Glazier is a former eBay executive who led the e-commerce pioneer’s three largest marketplaces. He was also previously the CEO of Eventful, a leading digital service connecting consumers with entertainment and local events acquired by CBS in 2014.
“Our platform is proving to be an ideal fit for partners to add differentiated value to their users by meeting shoppers where they are,” said Jordan Glazier, founder and CEO, Wildfire. “This financing round will support our accelerating growth with existing and new partners, and allow us to continue to execute on our vision to monetize organic commerce everywhere.”
“Until now, it’s been difficult for companies to encourage social commerce, deploy rewards programs to their users at the right point in the customer journey, and monetize word-of-mouth organic referrals. Wildfire has solved these problems with a versatile piece of infrastructure software and an orchestration layer that rewards users while also allowing merchants to drive conversion – starting at the top of the customer funnel,” said Neil Kapur, Partner, TTV Capital. “We are excited to be a part of Wildfire’s story and look forward to supporting Jordan and his team as they transform both the fintech and retail e-commerce markets.”
“Wildfire makes it possible for any financial institution to monetize and reward users' organic shopping across desktop and mobile, making it one of the game-changers driving financial services innovation, and the perfect organization to join our portfolio,” said Laura Bock, Principal, QED Investors. "There is a huge opportunity for financial services to improve their rewards offerings for e-commerce purchases. This opportunity is the reason PayPal made Honey its biggest-ever acquisition and the reason Capital One created Capital One Shopping.”
A handful of businesses have recently made significant acquisitions to integrate rewards offerings for their users, including PayPal (acquired Honey), Capital One (acquired Wikibuy to launch Capital One Shopping) and Rakuten (acquired Ebates). In contrast, Wildfire uniquely provides a white-label platform that enables any business to extend savings and rewards to their users via cashback, digital coupons, and incentives for social sharing. Its patented suite of technologies enable partners to embed Wildfire within their platform or app to detect and monetize end-users’ purchases and social sharing.