BuyWithMe Acquires Card-Linked Loyalty Company Edhance

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Monday, July 18th, 2011
edhance

A PR rep tells us Groupon and LivingSocial challenger BuyWithMe has acquired Edhance, which operates one of the largest student rewards program in the United States. Terms of the deal, which will be announced some time this morning, were not disclosed.

Update: the press release has hit the wire.

The news comes on the heels of our report on Groupon buying Zappedy, which also helps merchants to better understand and retain customers, using data gathered from a mixture of direct feeds and credit card aggregators.

The acquisition of Edhance will enable daily deals provider BuyWithMe to allow merchants to track customer return rates and ROI from daily deals and longer-term offers, as they can set up customized reward and loyalty offers linked to customers’ debit or credit cards.

Edhance, founded in 2007, is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts adjacent to the MIT campus. Amusingly, the company prominently features BuyWithMe rival Groupon on its website.

Company: BuyWithMe
Website: buywithme.com
Launch Date: March 2009
Funding: $36.5M

BuyWithMe is the premier group buying website where leading local merchants offer exclusive limited time offers to members of the BuyWithMe community. Through the power of its numbers, BuyWithMe negotiates handpicked group discounts for its customers to access at spas, restaurants, health clubs, bars and other local activities in their city. BuyWithMe currently publishes daily deals in 12 major DMAs, including Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, New York, and San Diego. BuyWithMe is...

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