Digital Wallet Startup Badge Raises $17M
Badge, a startup focused on building programmable wallet infrastructure, has raised $17 million in a new funding round. The company aims to develop what it calls “the next era of digital wallets,” which could open new possibilities for API-driven payment and asset management products.
- The $17.1 million funding consists of a $13.8 million Series A led by TTV Capital and a previously unannounced $3.3 million seed round led by QED Investors, with participation from Stripe, Synchrony Ventures, and Infinity Ventures. - Badge's platform is a "wallet-as-a-service" offering that provides a RESTful API for developers to programmatically create, manage, and update passes for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet. This infrastructure is designed to abstract away the complexities and idiosyncrasies between different mobile wallet platforms. - Key API capabilities include templated pass creation for consistent branding, user-specific pass generation for personalization, and the ability to update passes in real-time after they have been issued. The `userPassUpsert` endpoint is used to issue new passes or update existing ones. - Co-founder and CEO Eric Senn was previously the co-founder and CEO of Storr, an e-commerce platform that enabled brands to increase word-of-mouth sales. His experience with the difficulty of driving app downloads at Storr led to the idea of leveraging pre-installed mobile wallets as a customer engagement channel. - The investment from TTV Capital aligns with their focus on early-stage fintech companies, particularly in payments, banking, and embedded finance. The firm's involvement signals a belief that mobile wallets are becoming a foundational platform for brand-consumer interaction. - Notable use cases for Badge's infrastructure include powering interactive loyalty cards for the retailer Carrefour, which resulted in a 24% increase in average transaction value from wallet users, and enabling in-stadium loyalty cards for over 120 professional and collegiate sports teams through a partnership with Shift4. - The competitive landscape for wallet infrastructure includes players like PassKit and Airship, which also offer tools for creating and managing mobile wallet content and campaigns. The broader "Wallet-as-a-Service" (WaaS) market is seeing increased investment as businesses look to embed financial services and engagement tools directly into their applications without building the entire infrastructure from the ground up. - The funding is earmarked for accelerating go-to-market efforts, expanding product capabilities to include deeper integrations with CRM and e-commerce platforms, and enhancing analytics for measuring campaign performance and ROI.
