Benjamin Capital Partners has acquired augmented reality firm New Thing Co. to boost “money moments.”
Benjamin Capital Partners, based in New York and Oulu, Finland, hopes the deal will fuel the next stage of growth in its mission to disrupt the fast-growing consumer cash rewards market. The price was not disclosed, but Benjamin referred to the as a “talent acquisition.”
Austin, Texas-based New Thing Co. creates customer experiences on behalf of brand marketers, featuring its proprietary augmented reality rewards tool and technology. Meanwhile, the Benjamin app has accumulated more than one million users monthly active users, up from 150,000 in March, said Erno Tauriainen, chief product officer, in an interview with GamesBeat.
“They created AR technology, which is kind of like Pokémon Go, but with real money. So you open the camera at the location, and then you see the reality, what we call our money moments. Then you can grab the rewards,” Tauriainen said. “They’re user experience experts. We are implementing their AR technology on our platform. We can notify users at a location, like a Starbucks, that we have an offer for them.”
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This tool will be integrated into the fast-growing Benjamin app that allows consumers to generate cash rewards — called Benjamin Money Moments — on a broad range of everyday activities including purchases, mobile gaming, and viewing ads.
“Our vision is for Benjamin to be the facilitator of a comprehensive cash rewards lifestyle across the full range of commercial brands and entities with which consumers interact on a daily basis from groceries to
gas to going out to eat.” said Tauriainen. “The Benjamin wallet will be the catalyst for a series of ‘Benjamin Money Moments’ for consumers as they go throughout the course of their days.”
As part of the deal, New Thing cofounders Aubrey Johnson, CEO, and Jason Bender, CTO, will assume leadership roles in product development and engineering as EVP Product Strategy and EVP Technology, respectively. Both will be reporting into Tauriainen, a 15-year veteran of the cash rewards space.
“I’m pleased and excited to announce our acquisition of New Thing Co.,” said Tauriainen, in a statement. “By bringing Jason and Aubrey on board, we’re not only adding top-tier talent with unparalleled experience in cash-back and user engagement, but we’re also gaining cutting-edge AR technology that will revolutionize how consumers interact with brands, merchants, and games.”
Johnson and Bender are known for having built Dosh, a leading cash-back platform that was acquired
by Cardlytics for $275 million.
“What Aubrey and Jason were building and had built with Dosh was a world class user experience,” Tauriainen said.
“We are honored and thrilled to join the Benjamin team as they continue to have incredible success in the
consumer rewards space,” said Johnson, in a statement. “At Dosh, we built a premier cash rewards engine whose success was a function of creating a world-class user experience, supported by sophisticated technology. We are eager to apply this expertise to this company’s mission to put one or more Benjamins in every user’s wallet every single month.”
This acquisition coincides with a $13 million capital raise, including both debt and equity, from existing
investors Play Ventures and Big Bets VC. This fundraising was orchestrated by respected industry veteran Jordan Rohan, who joined Benjamin over the summer as its chief financial officer.
“We are delighted to have the continued support of our visionary investors. The financing has enabled
Benjamin to scale its user base past a million monthly active users,” said Rohan, in a statement. “This capital will also drive our expansion into exciting new verticals including commerce, payments, advertising and more.”
Origins
Tauriainen migrated to the U.S. in 2010, having grown up in Finland in a family retail business. In the U.S., he wanted to start something related to banking data as part of his American dream. He built a couple of startups that grounded him in cash rewards. The second business, Spent, (started in 2014) let people record and track their expenses. He created an app that he hoped would be better than Expensify. But the thing that took off with users were the special offers for affiliate links next to the expense numbers.
Since coming out of beta in October 2023, the Benjamin app already has over one million downloads.
Revenue growth has also been very robust and is approaching $4 million MRR in September, up from $1 million in May.
“We’ on a mission. We’re obsessed with this notion of putting one or more Benjamins in every user’s pocket every single month. That’s why we exist,” Tauriainen said.
The Benjamin app allows consumers to generate cash rewards – called Benjamin Money Moments – on a broad range of everyday activities including purchases, mobile gaming, and viewing ads. You can earn cash rewards by completing daily tasks in mobile games.
This versatility allows Benjamin to up the ante to compete against other established players in the cashback arena.
Focus on games
During recent months, the company has started to boost its gaming mission, working with third party vendors who provide the company with games. Tauriainen said the company has been working with more third-party aggregators as well as first-party game studios.
“They like us because we drive a lot of very high quality gamers who use the money moments,” he said. “That’s a tremendous development. The users love the app and go back on a daily basis.”
The gamers can do actions in games such as downloading or playing to reap rewards from the Benjamin app. Generally speaking, these are hypercasual games. But all brands have some of the same problems now.
“In this age of increased privacy, with the entire regulatory apparatus starting to push back on micro targeting, third party cookies have been marginalized. Now, every marketer is looking for a way to get consumers to look at a brand and engage with a brand,” Tauriainen said.
For game companies, marketers can be fairly precise with their goals. They could offer a reward after someone downloads a game, completes the first chapter, completes the third chapter, finished the game, or shares their results on social media. They can get the players to go “deeper and deeper” into the games, Tauriainen said. On top of that, they can layer in loyalty programs as well.
“We show them the money moment opportunities where they can earn more,” Tauriainen said. “It’s very heavily gamified like this.”
One of the benefits of working directly with the game companies and brands is that Benjamin can then set up and oversee the user experience. And that has a lot to do with the acquisition of New Thing Co., which has expertise in user experience.
“What we see with the Benjamin wallet is a massive opportunity going forward where the Benjamin wallet actually can become way to pay,” said Tauriainen. “We motivate people to earn items for the wallet.”
Benjamin has about 60 or 70 people across different locations. The aim is to help companies with reach to not just eyeballs but to engagement and the ability to monetize it.
“That’s what Madison Avenue is looking for,” Tauriainen said.
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