Six people left the same employer in 2014 to build a company that gave money back to shoppers.
Henry Chan and Joel Leong had worked at Zalora, the fashion retailer, where their work involved partnerships with brands and merchants. They had also both been through the NUS Overseas Colleges programme as students, which put them in start-up cities while still undergraduates. They quit stable jobs, brought four former Zalora colleagues with them, and began ShopBack in August 2014.
For a company built on a shopper handing over an account to earn a few dollars back, that gap mattered.
The idea was simple to explain. Online stores pay affiliates a commission when a shopper arrives through a link. ShopBack shared part of that commission with the shopper, as cashback. For the store, it was a sale it might not have had. For the buyer, it was a discount.
The early money was thin. A seed round of over US$500,000 came in 2014, and in March 2015 East Ventures and Accel-X led a US$600,000 round. About US$15 million more followed before the Series A.
The turn came in 2017 and 2018. Credit Saison led a US$25 million Series A in November 2017. By early 2018 the company reported annualised sales of over US$500 million across more than 5 million users, though that is sales through its links, not its own revenue. In April 2019 Rakuten Capital and EV Growth led US$45 million more.
Then it acquired its way into new markets and products. Seedly, a personal-finance community, came in May 2018 and was sold again in October 2020. In April 2020 it bought Ebates Korea. In November 2021 it bought the buy-now-pay-later firm hoolah.
The price showed up in trust. On 17 September 2020 ShopBack suffered a data breach and told customers eight days later. For a company built on a shopper handing over an account to earn a few dollars back, that gap mattered.
It now says it has about 30 million users in 13 countries. The founders began with a small observation: the money was already moving, and someone was keeping all of it.