360incentives.com Secures $7.65M Round Led By OMERS For B2B And Consumer Sales Incentive Platform

Whitby, Ontario-based 360incentives announced a new funding round of $7.65 million today, led by OMERS Ventures and including Klass Capital and Round 13 Capital. This is the four-year-old company’s first announced funding, and it’s a significant sum that 360incentives will put towards “further develop[ment]” of their platform and tech, as well as new market expansion, chief investor OMERS says.

The company already works with a number of major brands, including GE, Samsung and LG to incentive channel sales and offer both instant and mail-in rebates to clients, all through a single comprehensive automated platform. Clients of 360incentives can do things like set up and manage sales incentives programs for reseller partners, create rebate programs for consumers as well as loyalty rewards, and field multiple methods of payments including direct deposit, branded reward cards and more. The platform is built to integrate directly with Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and other leading sales management platforms for easy adoption by the big fish manufacturers 360incentives targets.

360incentives claims a solid track record, with 75 clients in global manufacturing secured over its four-year existence, all of which remain customers to this day. The fact that it was already an established company with a strong customer roster probably had a lot to do with inspiring confidence in OMERS, which, though one of Canada’s most active venture investment firms, tends to favor later-stage startups overall.

I spoke with Derek Smyth, OMERS Ventures Managing Director about the funding news, and he said that the deal came together after a year or so of developing the relationship with 360incentives and its founder and CEO Jason Atkins. Previously, 360incentives had operated on only a very small amount of seed funding and its own revenue, but Smyth and OMERS convinced Atkins that there was an opportunity for much faster expansion into new markets with the help of outside funding. What Atkins wanted to achieve in three to five years, in other words, OMERS could help him do much more quickly.

Those goals include not only expansion into new geographic markets, but also into new verticals. Currently, 360incentives serves primarily appliance manufacturing customers, but with the help of this funding, Smyth says the plan next is to get into consumer electronics, including mobile device and computer manufacturers, which is obviously a growth market.