ShopBack Wins $45 Million in Round Backed by Rakuten, EV Growth

(Bloomberg) -- An Asian rewards app that works with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and major online brands has snagged $45 million from Japan’s Rakuten Capital and other investors.

Rakuten Capital and EV Growth are leading the investment round for ShopBack, which offers cashback and other rewards for a plethora of names from Airbnb and Foodpanda to Booking.com and Alibaba’s Taobao. The Singapore-based startup, which has partnered with Visa and Mastercard, will use the capital to build up a data platform that provides merchants with insights into consumers, it said in a statement.

ShopBack, backed by the likes of SoftBank Ventures Asia, said it handled close to $1 billion in sales for some 2,000 merchants in 2018. The five-year-old startup operates across Asia and last year expanded to Australia, its first market outside of the region. Orders and sales surged 250 percent in 2018, ShopBack said.

(A previous version of the story was corrected in the headline to show Rakuten wasn’t the sole leader of the funding round)

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