Perkbox acquires digital rewards platform Loyalty Bay

Two companies are better than one: Perkbox, the U.K. startup that helps companies engage and reward employees and customers, has acquired London-based Loyalty Bay, which offers a SaaS platform for the automated delivery of digital rewards.

Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, though I understand it was cash and Loyalty Bay’s backers have exited. The startup raised $1 million in seed funding back in August 2015.

Founded in 2014 by William Roberts and Alex Farquhar, Loyalty Bay’s data analytics and rewards delivery software enables businesses to incentivise customers at various touch points — including on-boarding, purchasing, up-selling, and referring friends — through issuing digital rewards, such as gift cards.

The software integrates with existing CRM and customer feedback systems to ensure the right personalised reward is directed to the right customer at the right time. Its existing clients include The Financial Times, Compare the Market, and Boundless, among others.

“We are seeing a huge growth in reward spend from customers who want to reward employees for certain behaviour or performance. This is where we are plugging the Loyalty Bay digital reward technology into our core employee engagement product,” Perkbox co-founder and CEO Saurav Chopra tells me regarding the acquisition.

“For example, many of our hospitality customers like Nando’s, Le Pain Quotidien etc give rewards to employees such as ‘best store manager’, ‘customer advisor of the month’ etc, and they do this all manually with paper vouchers and no tracking or budget control”.

Powered by Loyalty Bay’s tech, Perkbox will now be able to automate this type of employee reward and help companies track and audit all the associated spend.

In addition, Loyalty Bay’s SaaS will support Perkbox with the other side of its business, which sees it help businesses run customer engagement and rewards programs and enable them to easily offer exclusive perks/rewards to customers.

“Loyalty Bay helps us scale this customer engagement/reward technology and we can support many more use cases like rewarding customers for certain events like contract renewal and other surprise and delight use cases,” he says.