Drop Picks Up $21 Million Series A and Hires Top Airbnb Director
Rewards are the new black.
Drop has announced they have raised a $21 million USD Series A funding round led by New Enterprise Associates. The round also saw investments from Sierra Ventures, White Star Capital, ff Venture Capital, Portag3 Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank.
The Toronto-based Drop is a fast-growing personalized rewards program that is specifically targeted towards millennials. Users simply link their credit and debit cards with the app and begin earning points for every dollar they spend.
The massive Series A is one of the biggest for a Canadian fintech company and will help the startup grow and scale throughout 2018 and beyond. The highlight of this will be a strong engineering push led by new hire Ian Logan. Logan, the former director of engineering at Airbnb and the leader of Airbnb Payments, will become Drop’s VP of engineering.
“I was inspired by the possibility of influencing the growing tech community in Canada,” Logan said regarding his new role. “I saw the opportunity to cross-pollinate my own experience and knowledge in scaling companies. I wanted to make as big of an impact as possible in helping local innovation. I am now on a mission to contribute to Canada’s startup ecosystem by helping make globally focused companies that are locally headquartered a success.”
Logan was born in Canada and studied at the University of Waterloo. He described his return to a Canadian tech company in a Medium post, putting his “family first” while also realizing that “Drop best hit the sweet spot of having massive potential.” Logan will look to build Drop’s engineering team and work on frontend engineering, backend engineering, data infrastructure, data science, and machine learning.
Drop has seen quick growth since launching in the U.S. this past October. That launch was also their last investment, a seed round worth $5.5 million led by current investors Sierra Ventures. The loyalty app recently hit one million total users and as it gains more popularity within the U.S., it should grow well past that.
There are several large brands represented on the Drop app, including Under Armour, Sephora, Amazon and more. They look to market towards millennials, even giving away free—you guessed it—avocado toast last summer. Their target demographic can be difficult for many companies to reign in, so any kind of actionable insight from Drop to these brands is incredibly valuable.
Drop is in the right market as well, at least according to Accenture. A recent study found that consumers crave personalized rewards—”half of those we surveyed are interested in or can be convinced with the right incentives to share their personal information to get more relevant offers,” read the report.
