The Four Cities Fund, Samsung Next, SV Angel, Precursor Ventures, The Mini Fund, Newtype Ventures, Patron, and The Points Guy creator Brian Kelly all participated in the funding round.
Kudos, an app and browser extension, was founded in 2001 by a group with prior expertise at Google, PayPal, and Affirm. It functions as a smart wallet assistant by suggesting or choosing the best credit card for customers to use when making payments in order to optimize rewards and cash back.
Recently, the company introduced a number of new features: Dream Wallet, which suggests cards to members based on their spending patterns; MariaGPT, an AI-powered card discovery tool with over 3000 cards in its database; and Kudos Boost, which offers personalized rewards across over 15,000 partner brands, such as Walmart and Sephora.
Since its initial fundraising round, Kudos has raised its annualized checkout Gross Merchandise Value to $200 million and expanded to over 200,000 registered users.
It intends to use the additional funds to develop MariaGPT into a comprehensive personal finance assistant, introduce an AI-powered hub offering expenditure optimization insights, and create a gateway that lets users book flights using points.
As consumers budgets, various credit cards, and sometimes complex rewards programs, they want to know they’re receiving the best value for their money, according to Tikue Anazodo, CEO of Kudos. With just one user-friendly app and extension, Kudos streamlines everything.”