SOCIAL APP CLAIM RAISES $12M TO HELP MARKETERS CONNECT WITH GEN Z SHOPPERS
Sweetgreen and Chubbies are offering in-app promotions
October 8, 2024
Claim, an app that helps shoppers find and use promotions at stores, has raised $12 million in Series A funding.
The funding was led by VMG Technology and also includes previous investors Sequoia Capital and Susa Ventures. The three-year-old company has raised a total of $20 million.
Claim’s goal is to help marketers find new customers. Apple, Google, and Meta’s shifts towards privacy have made it harder and more expensive for performance marketers to find ways to reach potential customers, said Sam Obletz, Claim’s cofounder and CEO.
Obletz wouldn’t share how many monthly active users the app has but the user base heavily skews toward college students. Claim has a presence at 70 U.S. campuses.
Personalizing in-app offers
To create an account with Claim, users have to connect their account with a credit or debit card. Doing so allows Claim to see where users have previously shopped, and the data is used to personalize weekly deals. Every Thursday, the app hosts a “drop” where users pick one of three promotions presented to them. Importantly, these are from places where consumers haven’t previously bought from, said Obletz.
“We’ve gotten our consumers excited to see an ad every week,” Obletz said.
Consumers then need to use the card linked with their account to redeem the promotion before it expires within a week. When the offer is used, Claim detects the transaction, and consumers are sent cash back via payment app Venmo.
Brands including Sweetgreen and Chubbies pay Claim to feature their products and are charged when someone redeems a promotion.
There’s also a social component that allows users to swap promotions with each other—as long as the promotion they want is from a brand they haven’t previously tried.
The idea is to show brands that new, Gen Z customers bought from their brand using transaction data gleaned from the app, Obletz said. Obletz said that brands pay to be featured in Claim from brand-focused budgets used to target Gen Z consumers like social media. Brands also pay using budgets created for opening new stores.
“Gen Z has a love-hate relationship with social media—it’s where life happens but people are really tired of it,” Obletz said. “If we can create new experiences for you as Claim, that’s an incredibly fertile place to be.”
Tap Stephenson, cofounder and chief technology officer at Claim, said that the company’s data about users does not leave the app.
Growing its Gen Z user base
Only people with a college-provided email address through an .edu domain can sign up for Claim. With the new funding, Claim wants to expand to more colleges beyond the East Coast. And this summer, the app ran a test allowing users to set their location in other cities during summer vacation, which expanded engagement within the app, Stephenson said.
Claim will use the money to expand to new markets and double the size of its 10-person team, said Obletz.
