Rezolve Ai Acquires Reward for $230 Million
Rezolve Ai, a NASDAQ-listed AI and commerce company, is acquiring Reward in a $230 million all-cash transaction. The deal combines Rezolve's conversational commerce technology with Reward's commercial media capabilities to accelerate innovation in the AI-powered banking and commerce sectors.
- The acquisition strengthens Rezolve's three-layer "Agentic Commerce" architecture, which consists of 'SmartPay' for digital payments, 'Subsquid' for real-time data, and 'Brainpowa,' its proprietary AI reasoning engine and LLM built for commerce. - Rezolve CEO Dan Wagner described the deal as "fundamentally a big data acquisition" that embeds Rezolve’s AI platform at the "transaction layer" by leveraging Reward's profitable transaction intelligence system. - This deal follows Rezolve's established strategy of growth by acquisition to build a complete AI commerce stack, having previously acquired companies like GroupBy for product discovery, Smartpay for payments, and Subsquid for data infrastructure. - The combined platforms create an architectural pattern applicable to insurtech; Reward's first-party transaction data from banks can serve as an input for an agentic AI system to perform tasks like claims verification or to generate hyper-personalized insurance product offers. - Reward will operate as a standalone business unit led by its CEO Jamie Samaha, a former Mastercard executive; the strategy is to cross-sell Rezolve's AI capabilities into Reward's established customer base of global banks and retailers. - Financially, the deal is expected to be immediately impactful, adding approximately $90 million in EBITDA-accretive revenue from Reward's profitable operations and increasing the combined 2026 revenue target to over $350 million. - Reward's platform is backed by global data and technology institutions Experian and TransUnion, providing a foundation of trust and data integrity for its customer engagement and commerce media services. - The founder and CEO of Rezolve, Daniel Wagner, is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded M.A.I.D., one of the first online information services in 1984, and Venda, a cloud commerce platform acquired by Oracle in 2014.
