Yoyo Wallet, a fast growing mobile payment and customer engagement platform from London, today announced a €13.6 million Series B round, led by Horeca, the venture arm of Metro Group, the €60 billion German retail conglomerate, with additional investment from Woodford Investment Management and Touchstone Innovations.
Founded in 2013, Yoyo Wallet helps retailers drive business growth via mobile-first customer engagement. Through the Yoyo app or via retailer-specific branded apps built and powered by Yoyo, the company helps retailers to know, influence and simplify their customer’s purchasing behaviours whilst providing an engaging customer experience. Yoyo’s platform provides a combination of fast and simple-to-use mobile ordering, payments, and personalised loyalty programs, all backed by an analytics and campaign platform for retailers.
Following the success of Caffè Nero’s launch of a Yoyo-powered mobile app across 640 stores in the UK and Ireland, this latest round will help the London-based company expand partnerships with UK high-street retailers, further expand the consumer and retail capabilities of its platform, and power its international expansion, with Europe as an initial target.
Alain Falys, the Co-Founder and CEO of Yoyo Wallet stated: “This new funding will allow us to provide the benefits of customer identification and mobile engagement to a wider array of retailers, large and small, in the UK and across Europe. We could not have found a better combination of investors to support us through this next stage of growth.”
Yoyo allows retailers of all sizes to provide their customers with a best-in-class branded mobile experience, whilst customising their offerings from the array of available Yoyo services. For a restaurant chain, for example, this could include order from table, pay from table, pre-ordering, pay at counter, all with embedded proprietary rewards schemes. Retailers “know” their customers and can provide rewards and offers on their customer’s phone, either at point of sale, or at any point of time through the relationship. Retailers save time, money and resources both in not having to develop their own mobile experience or app, and in not having to make modifications over time to continue to be best-in-class in a world of rapidly changing technology.
Yoyo had previously raised Seed and Series A rounds totalling €9.9 million powering their growth in the UK Education, Corporate and High Street sectors; generating more than 400,000 registered users; and an acceptance network in excess of 1,700 outlets including Caffè Nero and Planet Organic. The recently launched Caffè Nero app went straight to number 1 in the UK iOS and Android Food and Drink app charts in April this year.
Alain Falys adds: “Consumers are spending more than three hours a day on their smartphones and 40% buy more when subject to a personalised shopping experience. Yoyo simply provides all retailers with an accessible way of tapping into these behaviours.”
Hansjörg Sage, General Manager at the digital unit of METRO GROUP Wholesale & Food Specialist Company, commented: “With its strong track record of deploying digital technology at the customer interface, Yoyo’s solution can have a meaningful positive impact on a wide spectrum of retail businesses, in particular in the food and beverage segment. As digitization becomes mainstream in hospitality, Yoyo’s technology is a strong candidate for currently untapped market segments. As part of our engagement, METRO intends to contribute to this deployment.”
