Checkmate bags $5 million in Seed funding to help you discover great deals from popular brands

In 2021, PayPal bought the shopping and rewards startup Honey for $4 billion. Honey was created to help consumers save time and money. As of the time of the acquisition, Honey had over 10 million users worldwide to shop in over 30,000 retailers. We now have a new sheriff in town.

Enter Checkmate, a personalized smart shopping tool that captures all of your shopping deals from popular brands so you don’t have to. Checkmate is a 2-year-old tech startup aiming to take on Honey by making it easy for consumers to discover brands, apply savings and manage their orders post-purchase.

Checkmate claimed to have saved shoppers twice as much as Honey and other coupon code apps since its inception two years ago. The startup was launched during the pandemic by a team of engineers from Apple, Amazon, and Atlassian and a product strategist from Google who realized all their favorite savings apps weren’t saving them as much money as they used to.

To further accelerate product development and customer growth, Checkmate announced today it raised a $5 million seed funding round led by Fuel Capital, with participation from Kevin Johnson, former CEO of Ebates at Rakuten; f7 Ventures; Blackbird Ventures; Scribble Ventures; Hyper; and Susa Ventures.

Founded by three Australians Harry Dixon (CEO), Rory Garton-Smith, and Elliot Rampono, the San Francisco-based Checkmate is a free personalized tool for smart shoppers that streamlines the e-commerce experience from start to finish. Available as both a mobile app/extension and laptop extension, Checkmate helps customers find the best deals from users’ email inboxes and across the web and automatically applies them at checkout.

Consumers typically are so inundated with personalized email deals from brands that it’s tough to manage them all and remember to apply each deal at checkout. Available as both a mobile app/extension and laptop extension, Checkmate is the first solution that gathers all the best deals from a user’s personal email and the web and automatically applies them at checkout to help smart shoppers save the most they can.

“With record-high inflation, economic uncertainty and a volatile stock market, consumers are looking to save wherever they can,” said Harry Dixon, CEO and Co-founder of Checkmate. “At the same time, skyrocketing digital ad costs mean retailers and brands need new ways to establish and build their own customer relationships. We’re extremely proud to partner with this prestigious group of investors as we roll out a delightful product that helps smart shoppers save, while helping brands drive conversion and loyalty.”

For brands, Checkmate functions as a powerful conversion engine that also helps businesses attract targeted audiences and build long-term relationships with their customers. In a testing phase, users engaged with Checkmate 3.5 times per week and saved more than 27%, on average, when purchasing, versus roughly 15% with traditional savings apps.

“Checkmate has saved users twice as much as Honey in two separate studies and we’re excited to show shoppers how much savings they can discover,” notes Harry Dixon, CEO and Co-Founder. “We worked hard to launch the latest version just in time for holiday shopping so we can help as many people as possible save money!”