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Wrapp hits 15 million digital gift cards, raises $15 million

The social marketing company continues to grow with new brands and strategic investors important to its mobile efforts.

Donna Tam Staff Writer / News
Donna Tam covers Amazon and other fun stuff for CNET News. She is a San Francisco native who enjoys feasting, merrymaking, checking her Gmail and reading her Kindle.
Donna Tam
2 min read
Wrapp

Wrapp, the company that lets Facebook friends send digital gift cards to one another, has picked up $15 million from investors in the mobile manufacturing and mobile payments industries.

The money is going toward the development of the app's latest feature: brand pages. Users can now follow a brand for special deals for themselves.

"The whole idea with Wrapp is to build a win-win relationship between consumers and retailers," CEO Hjalmar Winbladh told CNET. Wrapp will start to add other features as well, he said.

The company is truly mobile first, according to Winbladh. Wrapp users access the service from its mobile app, which is connected to the Facebook platform, 90 percent of the time, and have sent a total of 15 million cards since the company launched in November 2011. The company -- now working with more than 200 retailers across the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Finland, Norway and Australia -- wasdelivering 1 million cards a week during the most-recent holiday season.

Mobile is going to continue to play that important role with the addition of Wrapp's new investors, according to Winbladh.

This second round of funding came from Wrapp's early supporters, Graylock Partners, Atomico, and Creandum, as well as new investors American Express, Qualcomm Ventures, and Nordic financial services group SEB.

In addition to the infusion of funding, Wrapp is gearing up to launch a new marketing campaign in the U.S. for a food-related product similar to a successful campaign in Sweden where McDonald's used Wrapp to launch a new product, a wrap aimed at woman between the ages of 20 to 40. It was meant to boost the company's image to the health-conscious demographic. Seventy percent of Wrapp's users are women, so it's a natural market to target.

Winbladh said SEB has important connections in Wrapp's test market, while American Express and Qualcomm Ventures provide connections to the mobile payments and mobile manufacturing sectors. Tapping into those mobile arenas is an interesting move for Wrapp, which could be gearing up for services that are geo-location specific, given what its new investors are focused on and Wrapp's goal to be built into digital wallets.

Winbladh said it's all about the connections, for now.

"We believe its about making strategic relationships with mobile operators and manufacturers over time," he said. "We feel it's important to build those relationships with that pipeline."