Maholla raises $1.5m for consumer rewards app
Summary
This follows a $580 000 pre-seed round in July 2022, bringing the companys total funding to over $2 million.The seed investors include Buffet Group, Castleton Capital, Praesidium Capital Management, and Galloprovincialis, which includes Mark Bowman, former managing director of SABMiller, and a prominent board member and investor in South African FMCG businesses.The Maholla app rewards users for scanning any receipt from any store, allowing users to earn rewards regardless of where they shop. Our company is on route to tracking as many purchases as a top 5 retailer in South Africa, said Jed da Silva, co-founder and head of product at Maholla.Maholla partners with CPG brands, restaurants, and consumer research companies to provide them with a granular, real-time understanding of what consumers are purchasing in South Africa.Brands such as Maggi, Milo, Ricoffy, Nola, Rama, Hungry Lion, Fusion, Switch Energy, and Mr. Sheen are among the many already benefiting from Mahollas superior dataset and targeting capabilities.David Pugh, digital marketing executive at RCL Foods, said, We are excited by Mahollas capabilities: delivering first-party shopping data and influencing purchasing decisions in real-time.Mahollas app works on all entry-level smartphones and has a download size of around 12MB, allowing it to compete for highly competitive storage space on a South African users device. Its image compression capabilities mean uploading a receipt incurs negligible data costs for users.With shopping being a daily activity, and smartphone penetration growing rapidly in South Africa, Maholla aims to continue building a product that supports tens of millions of shoppers, ensuring they get more back from their daily purchases. This will make a meaningful difference to lower-income households struggling to keep up with rising food costs in the country.This trend was revealed following the release of Mahollas year-on-year basket size data, which confirmed a 23.7% decrease in consumer basket sizes between February 2022 and February 2023.Maholla is a viral consumer app that rewards users for scanning any receipt from any store. The company then leverages these habits to target rewards for their CPG partners that encourage brand loyalty and shopper influence in real-time, with attribution.