It’s that special time of year… the days are getting shorter, leaves are falling, and gift cards are in the air.
The venture money is flowing into gift cards, as well. Gift card marketplace Raise just finished an $18.1 million funding round, according to GigaOm. Impressive — but this is exactly the same amount the company acknowledged receiving in December 2013, according to a report in the blog Built in Chicago, which would make its total funding to more than $36 million. Built in Chicago noted in its post that the company did not officially report the funding at that time.
CrunchBase, however, reports just $21.4 million in total funding for Raise. Raise itself reports $25 million. The conclusion would seem to be that this $18.1 million, while just being announced by the company, is not a new investment. A representative from Raise confirmed this to Bank Innovation today.
GigaOm reports that the round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, and also indicates that, as part of the deal, BVP partner Jeremy Levine, an early backer of Pinterest, joined the Raise board.
This comes as gift cards get hot. CEB Tower Group said that, by 2015, gift cards will account for 18% of holiday spending in the U.S. CardHub estimates the U.S. gift card market at $126 billion.
Raise has a business model much like CardCash. Both are marketplaces where users can buy and sell gift cards. In Raise’s case, buyers and sellers interact directly, whereas CardCash buys and sells the cards itself. For example, your grandmother sends you a $50 gift card to Banana Republic. Very sweet of her, but you don’t want it, so you sell it on Raise or to CardCash for, say, $42. They, in turn, sell it for $46 to someone else who is in need of a card like that. Everybody wins.
Where Raise apparently has a leg up on CardCash is in the digital space. It is claimed that a user waiting in line at BestBuy can ship for a card on his mobile device, and buy it and use it within minutes, because the cards can be bought, sold and used by an electronic code found on the cards. CashCard, by contrast, ships physical cards that often cannot be converted to digital value. (We know, we tried to do just that with a Starbuck card we bought there earlier this year. Now you know what to send us for Christmas.)
The money flowing into the gift card space from every direction seems to indicate there’s nowhere for gift cards and digital gifting to go but up.