Maholla, the consumer rewards app, has recently wrapped up a seed funding round amounting to $1.5 million (R27 million). The company had previously raised a pre-seed round of $580,000 in July 2022, bringing the total funds raised to date to over $2 million (R36 million). The seed investors included Buffet Group, Castleton Capital, Praesidium Capital Management, and Galloprovincialis, which boasts former SABMiller managing director Mark Bowman as a prominent board member and investor in South African FMCG businesses.
The funding will be used to scale the rewards platform to millions of users and deepen its technical moat.
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Founded in 2021 by Adam Reilly and Jed da Silva, Maholla rewards users for scanning receipts from any store, regardless of whether it’s a formal retailer, restaurant, wholesaler, or informal trader. Users can earn rewards in the form of instant airtime, 1Vouchers, and in-app games. Additionally, users can earn extra rewards for purchasing their favorite brands. By linking the shopping data of all receipts scanned to the consumer, Maholla builds an understanding of individual consumers’ shopping habits in South Africa. Due to its retail-agnostic approach and frictionless rewards process, Maholla has seen widespread adoption and user retention, on track to track as many purchases as a top five retailer in South Africa.
Maholla partners with consumer packaged goods brands, restaurants, and consumer research companies to provide them with real-time insights into consumer purchasing behavior. Maholla uses this data to target rewards that encourage loyalty and promote purchasing decisions for partners, including household names such as Maggi, Milo, Ricoffy, Nola, Rama, Hungry Lion, Fusion, Switch Energy, and Mr Sheen. RCL Foods’ digital marketing executive David Pugh said, “We are excited by Maholla’s capabilities: delivering first-party shopping data and influencing purchasing decisions in real-time.”
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The app works on all entry-level smartphones, with a download size of around 12MB, allowing it to compete for highly competitive storage space on South African users’ devices. Maholla’s image compression capabilities mean that uploading a receipt incurs negligible data costs for users. With shopping as a daily activity and smartphone penetration rapidly growing in South Africa, Maholla aims to continue building a product that supports tens of millions of shoppers, ensuring they get more back from their daily purchases.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard