The gamification of payments just got a healthy cash injection.
Florida-based startup Play2Pay announced Thursday it had raised $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Telesoft Partners with participation from Harbor Spring Capital.
The alternative payment platform says it brokers a “value exchange” between brands and consumers. Essentially, the platform converts user attention and engagement into a currency, which can be redeemed for bill payment. According to Play2Pay, the tech can reduce user bills by an average of 30% simply through games, videos, daily challenges, surveys etc.
Individual investors of the round included former AT&T vice chairman Ralph de la Vega, former Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, Madison Dearborn Partners co-founder and senior advisor Jim Perry and Virtusa founder and former CEO, Kris Canekeratne.
Those are some hefty players for a project that was bootstrapped in the first five years of its existence. It wasn’t until June 2020 that a series of angel investors gathered $7.5 million in a seed round for the Play2Pay platform.
But the investors surely have an idea of the strategy’s popularity. According to Brian Boroff, Play2Pay’s CEO and founder, revenue jumped 300% in the 12 months from June 2020 to June 2021 — the same time that seed round gave the company a boost.
The company claims itself to be positioned as the world’s first “ad supported payment rail” directly integrated into payments platforms of major service providers and financial institutions. The trade off is brands get a new way to promote their products and services, game developers get new users and videos get views — all of which equate to success for these companies.
“Not only did our partners see 25% of Play2Pay users generating revenue daily on the platform, we offered our brand and service provider partners a new level of data and analytics that allowed them to customize offerings and strengthen customer relationships,” said Brian Boroff, Founder and CEO of Play2Pay.
Boroff, a former telecommunications expert, founded the company in 2015 based on a vision that prepaid mobile phone users should have an alternative way to pay for their mobile phone service. In-turn, wireless carriers would adopt an ad-funded commercial model.
The international “opt-in” offering is currently available to more than 100 million mobile subscribers across the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia.