Lolli, a bitcoin and cashback rewards application, has raised an $8 million Series B round, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Adelman, said the fresh capital will be used to roll out Lolli’s rewards program to enterprise partners like exchanges, neobanks, banks, payment companies and browsers.
To date, Lolli has raised over $28 million. “We have historically raised the amount needed to win,” Adelman said. “We don’t take more money than we need to support our next phase of growth, and are very focused on operating efficiently and proving out our business model.”
The Series B round was led by BITKRAFT Ventures, with participation from Sfermion, Ulta Beauty’s Prisma Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures, ZebPay’s CEO Rahul Pagidipati, 2 Punks Capital, MZ Web3 Fund and others. Previous investors Seven Seven Six, Founders Fund’s Pathfinder Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Serena Williams’ Serena Ventures, Logan Paul and MrBeast’s Night Media also invested.
Since launching in 2018, the app has grown substantially and currently partners with more than 25,000 stores. Its rewards program awards its users with bitcoin or cashback when they shop online or in person at restaurants and stores. “Lolli is on track to expand the number of stores where users can shop to over 100,000 by 2025,” Adelman said.
The app gives up to 30% back on purchases, with an average of 7% back in bitcoin or cashback rewards. Since its inception, Lolli has given over $10 million in bitcoin rewards, in addition to cashback rewards, Adelman said.
Last year, the company launched Card Boosts, which lets users add bitcoin rewards to their debit or credit cards when they shop. Adelman called the product a “tremendous growth-driver” that helped users earn over five times the rewards on daily purchases like coffee, gas or groceries. As of October 2023, Lolli’s active shoppers have increased by more than 35% year-over-year, he added.
“Many of our users know the value of ‘earning the dip’ and have seen the benefits of earning bitcoin rewards with Lolli when the market is down,” Adelman said.
This means users who earned rewards when bitcoin was at $20,000 or lower in the beginning of 2023 have seen the value of their rewards double, given that bitcoin is over $40,000 today. “The earliest Lolli users who earned bitcoin when it was at around $3,000 have seen their rewards increase in worth by more than 10X today,” Adelman said.
As market players anticipate a greater breakout from bitcoin rising over 12% on the month, Lolli is also preparing by building new ways for users to earn rewards. The company plans to use the momentum in the markets to “drive more revenue to partners and bring more major companies into offering bitcoin rewards,” Adelman said. In 2024, Lolli plans to roll out more products, “big partnerships” and financial education, he added.
“We are growing quickly, and over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out new features and merchant partnerships that we think our users will love,” Adelman said. “As crypto adoption keeps rising, we are focused on becoming a holistic solution for our users to earn money every day, multiple times a day, and to learn about and earn bitcoin.”