A South African consumer rewards app, Maholla, has secured $1.5 million in seed funding to expand its retail-agnostic rewards and data platform, making it the largest in the country. This brings the total funding for the company to over $2 million after a $580,000 pre-seed round in July 2022. Investors in the seed round include Buffet Group, Castleton Capital, Praesidium Capital Management, and Galloprovincialis, with Mark Bowman, former managing director of SABMiller, among the prominent board members and investors in South African FMCG businesses. Maholla rewards users for scanning receipts from any store with instant airtime, 1Vouchers, in-app games, and more, with additional rewards for purchasing favorite brands. The company connects the shopping data from all scanned receipts directly to consumers, regardless of where they shop, in order to develop a detailed comprehension of each person's shopping behavior in the country. The app works on all entry-level smartphones and has a download size of around 12MB, allowing it to compete for highly competitive storage space on a South African user’s device. Maholla intends to create a product that can cater to tens of millions of shoppers in South Africa, as shopping is a routine activity and smartphone usage is rapidly increasing in the country. This is done to provide adequate support for these shoppers.
The app's retail-agnostic approach and frictionless rewards process have led to viral adoption and industry-leading user retention, with Jed da Silva, co-founder and head of product at Maholla, stating that the company is on track to tracking as many purchases as a top 5 retailer in South Africa. Maholla partners with CPG brands, restaurants, and consumer research companies to provide them with a real-time understanding of what consumers are purchasing in South Africa. The company uses purchasing data to target rewards that encourage loyalty and promote purchasing decisions for its partners, with brands such as Maggi, Milo, Ricoffy, Nola, Rama, Hungry Lion, Fusion, Switch Energy, and Mr. Sheen among those already benefiting from Maholla's superior dataset and targeting capabilities.
Maholla's year-on-year basket size data has revealed a 23.7% decrease in consumer basket sizes between February 2022 and February 2023, highlighting the impact of rising food costs on lower-income households in the country. With its mission to make a meaningful difference to these households, Maholla aims to continue building a product that supports tens of millions of shoppers.
The app's image compression capabilities mean that uploading a receipt incurs negligible data costs for users, further enhancing its accessibility. Maholla's success lies in its ability to leverage individual shopping habits to provide targeted rewards for its partners, encouraging brand loyalty and shopper influence in real-time with attribution. David Pugh, a digital marketing executive at RCL Foods, expressed excitement about Maholla's capabilities in delivering first-party shopping data and influencing purchasing decisions in real-time.
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