Why Checkmate is the Hottest Fintech App On the Block With Oodles of Celebrity Investors

Checkmate co-founders Harry Dixon, the CEO, Rory Garton-Smith, the CFO, and Elliot Rampono, the chief engineer, knew exactly what they were doing when they targeted the most technologically advanced generation Z and its overgrowing shopping habits.

Besides, a recent market report by Businessdit on ‘Gen Z Shopping Habits Stats in 2023’ revealed that 73% of Gen Z shop online with 60% of them saying they do so once every week.

Moreover, 26% of Gen Z reckoned that they preferred searching the internet to find new products at discounted prices.

Discounts is where Checkmate comes in. According to Dixon, landing the most interesting deals on the internet hinges on quality rather than quantity, at least for most people.

How Checkmate is Revolutionizing Online Shopping

Checkmate is the startup behind the most viral fintech apps that incorporates machine learning and language processors to scrape the shoppers’ emails and reveal promotions, discounts, and amazing deals from more than 40,000 online stores.

The platform, which is built for the Apple App Store, comes with a browser extension. Checkmate believes that most shoppers miss out on most promotions and deals since they often end up in spam emails or bundled in the “promotions” folder.

In addition, the co-founders of the company said that it is high time shoppers find a solution to the vast number of promotional text messages, which rarely convert into actual sales.

“Our entry point into helping streamline the whole shopping experience is savings,” Dixon said during an interview with Insider.

Checkmate became a success story right from the beginning with its 5$ million seed funding in September 2022. Within a few months of operation, it rose to the top of the Apple App Store before the end of the year.

Currently, the app boasts 400,000 users, 60,000 of them being daily active users. In addition to this, Checkmate is becoming an online sensation, and thanks to Gen Z shoppers – it has more than 600,000 followers across social media platforms including Instagram and TikTok.

After installing the app, online shopping becomes so easy as Checkmate gathers all the discounts that are currently available.

Unlike its rivals in the online shopping space, Checkmate lauds itself on the ability to find codes from various sources including online searches, email extractions, and exclusive partnerships with brands, ensuring it saves users twice as much compared to what shoppers get elsewhere.

Checkmate uses a Safari mobile browser extension to achieve this functionality. With more shoppers using their phones for online shopping, Checkmate takes this trend into account and goes a step further by providing live updates on orders, package tracking, and notifications of new sales.

Since the app is available on desktop devices as well, Checkmate ensures a holistic, convenient and simplified shopping experience for its users.

Checkmate Locks $15 Million in Series A Funding

According to a related report by Insider, Checkmate announced its Series A fund, which raised $15 million led by Google’s parent company – Alphabet’s venture arm, GV (formerly Google Ventures) in addition to BDuck Capital, Wischoff Ventures, and Saurabh Gupta, partner at DST Global.

The funding round also saw participation from renowned celebrity investors like Paris Hilton, the American electronic DJ, production duo, The Chainsmokers (Mantis VC), and officials from established companies, including Pinterest, Honey, Linktree, Amazon, Brex, Rakuten, Grindr, Google, and Ancestry.com.

Checkmate’s success story shows that with the right product and niche to fill, it is possible to grow a company quickly.

“The last decade has seen a boom in e-commerce, but our shopping experience hasn’t changed until now. We strongly believe in Checkmate’s technology, team, and approach to reaching new consumer audiences,” GV partner Frederique Dame said in a statement.

Dixon, who is Australia born, started working on the company with his business partners, Garton-Smith and Rampono towards the end of 2021. E-commerce had boomed during the COVID pandemic but this growth started weighing the online ecosystem down.

Some platforms like Gmail started grouping promotional emails into a unique folder for customers to either quickly find them or keep them out of the way. This became a challenge for online retailers who depend on email marketing to promote their products.

Furthermore, Apple made changes to its identifier for advertisers (IDFA) guidelines, making it difficult for apps to share or track data. While this was a major win for the privacy of iOS users, it disadvantaged online shopping platforms.

Meanwhile, Apple gave third-party developers such as Checkmate the freedom to stretch the functionality of their apps to the browsers like Safari using iOS extensions.

“We thought there’s a massive market gap here to build something that’s extremely privacy-conscious, very user-friendly, and helps merchants out with their marketing while allowing people to save money in the way that savings are actually done now,” Garton-Smith said.

Dixon intends to use the $15 million Series A funding to ensure the privacy and security of users on the app remain airtight. Currently, Checkmate utilizes encryption software which Google audits yearly.

Other short-term goals are to grow the 12-member team and ramp up product promotion through partnerships and influencer marketing on top of building lasting relationships with merchants.

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