Introducing Checkmate’s $15M Series A funding round

Checkmate has raised $15M in Series A funding led by GV (Google Ventures), with new support from Mantis VC (The Chainsmokers), Common Metal, BDuck Capital, Black Angels Group and continued support from Wischoff Ventures, Fuel Capital, Blackbird Ventures, F7 Ventures, Night Capital & Scribble Ventures. The round also includes an all-star line up of angels including Paris Hilton, Carter Reum (M13 Ventures), Saurabh Gupta (Partner at DST Global), Tim Kendall (Meta & Pinterest), Jeff Bonforte (exGrindr & Yahoo), James & Geraldine Chin Moody (Sendle), Alex & Anthony Zaccaria (LinkTree), Trevor Neff (Ashton Kutchers Sound Ventures), Arthur Levy & Michael Tannenbaum (Brex).

Here’s what Frederique Dame, Partner at GV, had to say about why she invested in us:

“Checkmate has become a part of people’s everyday shopping experience, and its viral growth over the past eight months demonstrates early product-market fit. 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. We’re thrilled to partner with Harry Dixon and Rory Garton-Smith as they move digital shopping forward.”

E-commerce isn’t only growing at an unprecedented pace, it’s also experiencing major tectonic shifts. Retailers have gone from marketing promotions and deals online in publicly available forums to personalized marketing, sending catered offers to individual shoppers. Meanwhile, new regulations have made it harder for businesses to reach consumers in an effective way.

Existing savings apps haven’t kept up with these changes, which means they’re only accessing a small percentage of savings for consumers. As a result, when a consumer is ready to shop or make a purchase, they’re left searching through email inboxes for past deals, researching and experimenting with different codes, or trying affiliate links found online.

Enter: Checkmate, a new era for automatic savings

Checkmate finds savings at over 40,000 stores, and has adapted to changes in e-commerce. Checkmate does it all – finds codes online, extracts codes from email, and even partners exclusively with brands on new codes. It’s no surprise that on average we save our users 2x more than the competition.

Checkmate is a phone app that leverages the Safari Mobile Browser via an extension. This is key, because not only is more shopping happening online than ever before, consumers are using their phones for most purchases.

#1 in the Apple App Store, with 60K daily users

It’s exciting to see how Checkmate has become a part of people’s everyday shopping experiences in just about eight months. We hit #1 in the Apple App Store at the end of last year, and today we’ve surpassed over 380K users – including 55K daily active users. People spend millions through our extension each week, and we’ve helped people save hundreds of thousands of dollars to-date. Our product continues to go viral on social media, and we have over 600K followers across our TikTok and Instagram accounts.

What’s next: personalizing the end-to-end shopping experience

We have big visions for what comes next at Checkmate. We want to create an end-to-end shopping experience that helps people every step of the way – from browsing to buying to delivery. We’re already taking important steps in getting there. For instance, Checkmate allows users to track packages in a single place so they never have to wonder when something will arrive, or check different emails or sites for order updates.

As we evolve, we believe the entire shopper experience should be personalized based on shopping habits and interests, so that shoppers feel like recommendations are helpful rather than the endless spam they’re familiar with.

Between inflation and a tough economy, now more than ever people are on the hunt for the best deal. There’s no reason that this should be a time consuming or overwhelming process. Checkmate believes people should feel confident about their shopping experience, and be rest assured that they’re getting the best price on every purchase.

Give the product a try by downloading it on your phone, or if you want to get in contact with us, reach out at hello@joincheckmate.com.