Nigeria’s leading multi-merchant rewards platform ThankUCash has raised $5.3 million in seed funding.
The seed round was co-led by 500 Global and Unicorn Growth Capital with participation from Expert Dojo, Predictive VC, SaaS growth Ventures, Betatron Hong kong, Accelerex Holding, Andrew Dell (former CEO of HSBC), Craig Fenton (Director, Strategy & Operations At Google), among others.
ThankUCash which operates in Nigeria’s 3 major cities – Lagos, Abuja and Port-Harcourt, plans to use the funds to scale operations to other cities across the country and expand to Ghana and Kenya. What you should know about ThankUCash
ThankUCash, founded in 2018 by Simeon Ononobi, Suraj Supekar, Madonna Ononobi, and Harshal Gandole, provides cashback on purchases and discounts from thousands of merchants, allowing companies to keep customer loyalty, improve income, and expand.
ThankUCash has over 600,000 users and has onboarded over 1,000 stores on its platform, processing over $80 million in transaction volume in just over two years of operation with a team of about 45 employees.
The startup has also signed a partnership with Interswitch to onboard all their merchants and improve their numbers. The startup has Wema Bank and about seven other national and multinational bank partnerships in the pipeline.
Read: Nigerian lending startup, Payhippo raises $3 million in seed funding
According to ThankUCash CEO Simeon Ononobi, the funds will also be used to introduce two new products. “ We are expanding our products to remittances in all our markets and a ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ infrastructure to power the industry.”
ThankUCash will offer the technology infrastructure that will connect merchants with credit/loan providers, allowing users to pay for products and services directly through the ThankUCash super App using loans from credit providers.
“The technology is such that we have our machines in stores. So as customers request loans, we generate a code for it, customers input it into the POS machine and the merchant gets credited directly. The code can only be used in the store chosen and only for the loan amount requested, such that at the end of the day the customer is buying straight from the merchants. We’re opening this infrastructure to everybody and want to actually give that platform to loan companies, ” he explained.
Read: From Pre-Seed to Series D: Startup Funding Rounds Explained Ononobi highlighted ThankUCash’s distinctive cash back product, revealing that positive feedback from merchants who are enthusiastic about the product and how it has […]