South African startup Receiptful, which aims to “supercharge” email receipts with personalised marketing messages and up-sells, has raised US$500,000 from a group of investors to help it grow its user base.
Officially launched in November last year by WooThemes and WooCommerce co-founder Adii Pienaar, Receiptful allows users to send email receipts that include targeted marketing messages. The platform also integrates out-of-box with leading e-commerce platforms, and has a recommendation algorithm that analyses customer behaviour.
The startup has so far sent more than 285,000 receipts, and is currently sending 4,000 receipts per day. Pienaar told Disrupt Africa each receipt generates an average value of US$0.50 in additional revenue.
Receiptful has now raised a US$500,000 angel round from a group of investors including Matt Mullenweg, Joel Gascoigne, David Hauser, Andrew Wilkinson, Vinny Lingham, Daniel Guasco, Wayne Gosling, Manuel Koser, Justin Drennan, Riaan Conradie, Roy Rodenstein, Collis Ta’eed, Ta’eed, Guillermo Rauch, Jesse Rasch, Michael Leeman, Mark Levitt and Henk Kleynhans.
“The funding is to grow our current user base, which enables two things: 1) learning from a bigger data set; and 2) switching on our initial revenues. The latter is critically important, as we’d like to grow Receiptful with a combination of strong revenues and also future funding rounds,” Pienaar said.
He said he had launched Receiptful as he wanted to build a tool to “supercharge” email receipts and leverage the experience, skills and networks established through WooThemes and WooCommerce.
The funding round, he said, would give Receiptful breathing room to the point that it does not have to pursue revenue right away.
“This has meant we’ve been able to build out our vision of what a supercharged receipt should and could look like without having to immediately charge for that,” he said.
Pienaar said though Receiptful had already proven its worth, having the backing of investors of the calibre of those involved in this round – all entrepreneurs in their own rights – validates his beliefs and insecurities as an entrepreneur.
“It really adds momentum to the things I’m working on as the founder and leader of Receiptful, knowing that these are clever individuals who supports our vision for the future,” he said.
He said Receiptful had pursued investors it felt could add value beyond the monetary investment.
“Our investors brings a diverse value-added component to what we’re doing: some add a lot of social proof and visibility, others have specific domain expertise in e-commerce, and others have contact books that I could only dream about. I definitely tried to find a good combination of all those things.”
