It’s now broadly accepted that customers and employees who receive corporate gifts end up appreciating the brand much more, and for not a lot of outlay. The market for this has thus exploded. One market player, the New York-based Snappy, which has raised over $125 million to date, is now acquiring Covver, a corporate merchandise gifting platform. Terms were undisclosed, although TechCrunch understands the deal involved a mix of cash and shares.
Covver was previously backed by TLV Partners, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and has raised $7 million to date. It specializes in swag-style merchandize for companies, and also offers points-based recognition solutions for employees. It also personalizes the products automatically. So for instance, someone could send me swag with my job title (Editor-at-large) and the system would automatically create swag with my job title on it, no graphic design required.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Hani Goldstein, Co-Founder and CEO of Snappy, said Covver’s expertise in swag and company store solutions complements Snappy’s ability to deliver these kinds of gifting experiences, and that the platforms would be unified, with Cover effectively becoming the “swag channel” on Snappy’s platform.
“What Covver built was an amazing experience for swag that’s based on AI and does it extremely well and innovatively,” she said. “They were specializing in swag. So we felt like this solution can take all the personalization magic and bring it into the combined world of how we do gifting better, to become the leading gifting platform worldwide.”
“There’s about $50 billion worth of gift cards, only in the US,” she added. “The corporate gifting world is worth about $260 billion. But people don’t know what to buy, so they use gift cards. So that provides choice, right? But that it becomes very transactional. It’s like ‘Hey, Mike, here’s 100 bucks!’ But I wanted to make you feel delighted. So what we want to do is make gifting easy, but still keep the magic and personalization.”
In a statement, Roee Hemed, CEO of Covver said: “By joining forces with Snappy, we’re unlocking new possibilities for our customers, including expanded product solutions and the ability to leverage Snappy’s trusted gifting platform.”
Snappy was first launched on TechCrunch back in 2016 as a consumer app, and bootstrapped its progress until it eventually raised from investors including Notable Capital, Hearst Ventures, Qumra, 83 North, and other VCs.
It claims to have over 47% of Fortune 100 companies as clients such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast.
However, it does have competitors. Sendoso has raised $152.7 million to date, Postal raised $46 million, and Dublin-based corporate gifting platform &Open raised $26 million in 2022.
