Rezolve Ai Acquires Reward for $230M
Global commerce and AI firm Rezolve Ai has acquired Reward in a $230 million all-cash deal. The acquisition aims to combine Rezolve's conversational commerce capabilities with Reward's platform to accelerate innovation in AI-driven banking and retail. The company expects the deal to create a unique offering in conversational and retail media.
- The all-cash deal is expected to be EBITDA-accretive and add approximately $90 million in revenue for Rezolve in fiscal year 2025. - Reward, founded in 2001 by Gavin Dein, is the U.K.'s largest provider of bank-linked rewards, operating in over 15 countries and partnering with major banks like NatWest and Barclays, as well as payment networks like Visa and Mastercard. - To date, Reward reports it has returned over $2.5 billion in cashback rewards to customers and facilitated approximately $20 million in charitable donations. - Rezolve AI is led by CEO Daniel Wagner, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded and sold Venda, an enterprise e-commerce platform, to Oracle in 2014. - The acquisition is a key part of Rezolve's "Agentic Commerce" strategy, which uses a proprietary AI large language model to automate and enhance the entire retail lifecycle. - This move combines Rezolve's AI tools with Reward's first-party data to compete in the rapidly growing retail media market, which was valued at over $30 billion in 2023. - The deal follows a recent oversubscribed $250 million financing round for Rezolve AI, which was earmarked for M&A, global deployments, and scaling infrastructure. - The combined entity aims to create a unified platform for AI-driven discovery, customer engagement, transactions, and loyalty, addressing a conversational commerce market projected to exceed $22 billion by 2031.
