It is now widely accepted that customers and employees who receive corporate gifts end up valuing the brand much more and for less. The market for this has exploded like this. One market player, New York-based Snappy, which has raised over $125 million to date, is now acquiring Covver, a platform for corporate merchandise gifts. Terms were undisclosed, though TechCrunch understands the deal involved a mix of cash and stock.
Covver was previously backed by TLV Partners, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and has raised $7 million to date. It specializes in swag-style merchandise for companies, and also offers points-based recognition solutions for employees. It also customizes products automatically. So, for example, someone could send me swag with my job title (Editor-at-large) and the system would automatically create swag with my job title in it, no graphic design required.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Hani Goldstein, co-founder and CEO of Snappy, said that Covver’s expertise in swag and company store solutions complements Snappy’s ability to deliver these types 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 incredibly well and innovatively,” she said. “They specialized in swag. So we thought this solution could take all the magic of personalization and bring it into the combined world of how we gift better, to become the leading gifting platform around the world.”
“There are about $50 billion in gift cards in the US alone,” she added. “The world of corporate gifts is worth about $260 billion. But people don’t know what to buy, so they use gift cards. So that offers choices, right? But that becomes too transactional. It’s like ‘Hey, Mike, here’s $100!’ But I wanted to make you feel satisfied. So what we want to do is make it easy to donate, but still keep the magic and personalization.”
In a statement, Roee Hemed, CEO of Covver said: “By joining forces with Snappy, we are unlocking new opportunities for our customers, including expanded product solutions and the ability to leverage Snappy’s trusted gifting platform.”
Snappy was first pitched to TechCrunch in 2016 as a consumer app and saw its progress until it was eventually raised by 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 has competitors. Sendoso has raised $152.7 million to date, Postal has raised $46 million and Dublin-based corporate gifting platform &Open has raised $26 million in 2022.
