Carving Labs Bets on the Emerging Market for Mobile Wallets

The French mobile marketing start-up Carving Labs announces a funding round, and rebrands to “Captain Wallet”. This roundtable won support from investors encouraged by conclusive results and recent launch of their mobile wallet.

Carving Labs was founded in 2013. Their offer consists in dematerialising loyalty cards to provide brands with additional, mobile-based, ways to connect with their customers.

The customer is sent a link from the brand so he can digitalise his loyalty card, and store it to his wallet. The brand may then convey information, discounts or other alerts to his mobile phone. Through these offers, in-store conversion rates would reach 30%.

By way of supporting their development, this start-up just raised €2 million. Among considered projects, Captain Wallet means to hire more employees, and aim for additional market verticals (hospitality, airline companies, e-commerce) as well as international expansion, starting in the UK and Spain.

Comments – Payment and loyalty, perfect match on mobile

Captain Wallet already attracted roughly 30 brands, and 20 more are likely to join by the end of 2018. This interest can be accounted for by the success encountered by their solution: with these digital card, customers’ shopping carts increase by 7% on average and they buy more often. Captain Wallet charges a monthly subscription fee to the brands, based on how extensive their customer base is.

They now will rely on the growing success of mobile wallet offers, including Google Pay, with whom they partnered for their French launch. This may be a key asset when facing competition from larger industry players: the US-born Stocard, for instance, as it recently landed in France following funding round, too.