Israeli startup Appcard, which has developed a marketing and loyalty platform for small and medium sized retailers, has raised $20 million in Series B funding. PLDT Capital, the investment arm of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT, NYSE:PHI, PSE:TEL) and Alexander Rittweger, founder of Loyalty Partner, led the round. Existing investors: Founders Fund (Peter Thiel), Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt), and Jerry Yang also participated.
Headquartered in New York and with its development center in Ramat Hasharon near Tel Aviv, AppCard was founded by CEO Yair Goldfinger and CTO Amichay Oren. Goldfinger is a talismanic serial entrepreneur and angel investor best known as one of the founders of ICQ developer Mirabilis in the 1990s, which was sold to AOL. He has also founded Dotomi, a personalized online-advertising platform acquired by ValueClick.
Goldfinger said, “AppCard continues to deliver on its vision to empower retailers to make data driven marketing decisions based on customers’ buying behaviors.”
AppCard empowers thousands of retailers to market directly to their customers in a personalized way. The technology combines item-level smart data capture with artificial intelligence to automate marketing. After developing and optimizing the product to cater to specific retail verticals, AppCard released its latest version in the second half of last year and generated explosive growth. The new funding is intended to fuel that and further develop the technology. “I’m convinced that AppCard’s advanced technology will help us build a performance-marketing platform unrivalled in the small and medium-sized business marketplace,” said Rittweger. “The AppCard platform caught our attention because of its advanced technology and creative business model,” said Winston Damarillo, Co-Managing Director of PLDT Capital. “The leadership is a dream team, consisting of successful tech and loyalty entrepreneurs. We’re excited to bring the benefits of AppCard to the PLDT Group, as well as to consumers and merchants in the Philippines and the Southeast Asian region.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on February 26, 2016
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