Nano-Local Commerce App Bounty Nabs Undisclosed Seed Funding From Fireside Ventures And Others
Bounty, a Bengauru based nano-local app has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Fireside Ventures, Mumbai Angels and MAPE Group. The round also saw active participation from Basab Pradhan, former Global Head of Sales and Marketing at Infosys, and real estate group scion Apurva Salarpuria of Salarpuria Group. The 7-month-old startup will use the funds for expanding to other cities, adding new retail categories and enhancing the product and technology stacks.
Bounty is a hassle-free app that rewards users automatically with bounty points when they walk into business locations– restaurants, pubs, retail stores, saloon, spa, shopping places etc. Every time a user walks into any of these business locations,
the app’s ‘intelligent assist’ feature automatically recognizes the location and alerts the user to collect reward points. Interestingly, this patent-pending technology works without GPS and even without data being enabled.
Bounty provides the perfect platform for brands to reach out to consumers in a cost effective and meaningful way.
says Satish Medapati, Founder & CEO of Bounty.
Jacob Mathew, MD of MAPE Advisory Group said
Rewards programs across the world have always had issues due to lack of flexibility and relevance. bounty solved the problem of hassle-free rewards for consumers through its patent-pending technology and I see a great potential for bount.
Bounty also helps the retail businesses to drive footfall track customer behavior within the store and incentivize purchases. Once customers download the app, bounty automatically checks in the user whenever they visit a bounty recognized business location. Users earn rewards for checking in, while retail businesses can promote their offers through personalized and targeted campaigns.
Representing Mumbai Angels, Bharat Devanathan, former COO of Groupon APAC said,
Retail businesses do not know who has entered their store until the customer actually makes a purchase. Imagine if retail businesses have the same ability as websites – to identify customers at entry. That’s the power of bounty for retail businesses. The benefits of this to the customer and the businesses are many fold…ranging from loyalty programs, rewards and personalized offers to customers.”
The technology on which Bounty is based, called Indoor Positioning has seen massive interest from Apple, Google , Qualcomm, Nokia, Samsung , Microsoft etc as well a host of valley based startups. Basab Pradhan, former Global Head of Sales and Marketing at Infosys said, “Indoor positioning is ‘the holy grail’ for personalization for many location based apps as well as for social and ad network apps to better market to customers or to provide just-in-time information or to transact.”
The app currently available in Google Playstore has more than 100K+ downloads and a high repeat user rate. bounty claims that as India’s fastest growing rewards app, it is also the first to launch a smartwatch check-in in India. Bounty’s app downloads grew more than 14 times in the last 6 months and check-ins by users grew by more than 25 times – all without any advertising or marketing. The app so far has driven more than 1 Mn check-ins and rewarded users with more than 20 million bounty points.