PunchTab, a startup that offers a social loyalty platform for consumers and publishers, has raised $850,000 in seed funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Embarcadero Ventures, and angels Venky Harinarayan, Anand Rajaraman, and Nick Sturiale. PunchTab is the brainchild of YouSendIt founder Ranjith Kumaran.
PunchTab allows publishers to give reward points to users who check in to a site or blog every day. Visitors, which authenticate via Facebook Connect, can earn points for Facebook comments, WordPress comments and Facebook likes. Once a publisher rewards a user, the visitor can redeem the reward through the PunchTab rewards catalog. The startup says the integration is simple, only requiring a publisher to add a few lines of code.
So far over 350 websites have integrated PunchTab into their sites. Philip Seyfi, owner of Japanese language instructional site, NihongoUp.com, says his 40,000 members have responded well to his business’ new loyalty program created with PunchTab. The company reported a 15% increase in Facebook fan page Likes in the first few days of implementation.