Since its inception, Atlanta-based startup MaxRewards has been focused on “helping people make smarter financial decisions,” said co-founder and CEO Anik Khan.
The platform initially gained traction in the student loan repayment space, but Khan said he and his team wanted to get closer to an area of FinTech they were more passionate about: Maximizing credit card rewards.
That personal passion is bringing big returns to American consumers, who on average hold four different credit cards in their wallets at any time. MaxReward’s platform is designed to tell which card will provide the best offer at an individual merchant, track offers, and keep on top of bills and credit scores in one place.
The platform won the FinCon Fintech Startup competition in 2018 and graduated from Techstars Atlanta in 2019.
“Our “secret sauce” is our proprietary connectors, which give us unique capabilities like aggregating rewards and activating offers. It took us a while to make the connectors stable enough for mainstream use. That happened in the 2nd half of last year, and since then we’ve grown like crazy,” Khan told Hypepotamus.
That growth includes increasing monthly active users by 200% since the beginning of the year alone.
It has also propelled its latest round of funding: a $3 million seed round co-led by Florida-based Calano Ventures and Nebraska-based Dundee Venture Capital.
Khan said he first connected with the Calano team via a mutual connection. “From the first pitch, it was clear that Arron and Joel (partners at Calano) just understood our vision, how big of a company we could become and our moat,” he added.
Other investors in the round include Atlanta-based Nick Izquierdo (President of FLEETCOR), and VC firms Fintech Ventures Fund and Service Provider Capital.
“One of the phrases I heard from Techstars was that “The difference between a marriage and an investor relationship is that you can divorce your spouse.” We wanted to bring investors who we really wanted to work with, and we have been fortunate to have a great set of investors who are not only brilliant but just fantastic people we enjoy spending time with,” said Khan.
The seed funding will go towards expanding teams on both the product and technology side of the business.
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