Maholla, a viral consumer reward’s app, has just concluded a $1.5 million seed funding round. The company raised a $580 000 pre-seed round in July of 2022, bringing its total funding to date to over $2 million dollars. Seed investors include the Buffet Group, Castleton Capital, Praesidium Capital Management and Galloprovincialis. Galloprovincialis includes Mark Bowman, former Managing Director of SABMiller, and prominent board member as well as investor in South African FMCG businesses. 

The Maholla team will use its funding to scale its rewards platform to millions of users and deepen its technical moat.

Maholla is a viral consumer app that rewards users for scanning any receipt from any store. This allows users to always earn rewards irrespective of where they shop - from formal retailers to restaurants, wholesalers and informal traders. Rewards come in the form of instant airtime, 1Vouchers, in-app games and more. Maholla users can also earn extra rewards for purchasing their favourite brands.

The app proceeds to link the retail agnostic shopping data of all receipts scanned, directly to the consumer, in order to build a granular understanding of the shopping habits of individual consumers in South Africa. Due to its retail-agnostic approach and frictionless rewards process, Maholla has seen viral app adoption and industry-leading user retention. “Our company is on route to tracking as many purchases as a top 5 retailer in South Africa” shares Jed da Silva, Co-Founder and Head of Product at Maholla. 

The table attached offers a snapshot of the Maholla App’s retention rate, as benchmarked against other tech-based industries across the globe. 

Maholla partners with CPG brands, restaurants and consumer research companies to provide them with a granular, real-time, understanding of what consumers are purchasing in South Africa today. Maholla makes use of this purchasing data to target rewards to users that encourage loyalty and promote purchasing decisions for their partners. 

Household names including the likes of Maggi, Milo, Ricoffy, Nola, Rama, Hungry Lion, Fusion, Switch Energy and Mr. Sheen are among the many brands already benefiting from Maholla’s superior dataset and targeting capabilities. David Pugh, Digital Marketing Executive at RCL Foods, states that “we are excited by Maholla’s capabilities: delivering 1st party shopping data and influencing purchasing decisions in real-time”.

Maholla’s app works on all entry level smartphones and has a download size of around 12mb, allowing it to compete for the highly competitive storage space of a South African user's device. Its image compression capabilities mean uploading a receipt incurs negligible data costs for users.

With shopping a daily activity, and smartphone penetration growing rapidly in South Africa, Maholla aims to continue building a product that will support tens of millions of shoppers, in a manner that ensures they get more back from their daily purchases. 

This will make a meaningful difference to lower income households, which are struggling to keep up with rising food costs in our country. This trend was revealed following the release of Maholla’s year on year basket size data, which was able to confirm a 23.7% decrease in consumer basket sizes between February 2022 and February 2023.