Cake receives capital injection of 4.6 million euros and focuses on international expansion

Backed by the capital injection, the Belgian startup Cake is writing the recipe for the future: the independent banking app Cake will disappear from February 2022 and will make way for European expansion with services aimed at retailers and brands (via Cake for Business) and banks (via Cake for Banks).

Attractive marketing platform for companies
Cake for Business is already firmly on track in Belgium. The marketing platform with which retailers and brands can offer cashback discounts to groups of consumers in a targeted way, based on their historical purchasing behavior, is running at full speed. There are already more than 100 commercial partners, including Schoenen Torfs, JBC, Veritas, Deliveroo and Lukoil.

Belgian consumers have already earned more than 800,000 euros in automated cashbacks via the Cake platform, of which 125,000 euros in December 2021.

In addition to this ability to offer cashback discounts to consumers, Cake also provides market insights to brands and companies based on the anonymized processing of consumer purchasing behavior.

Cake for banks
Since its launch in early 2020, just before the corona crisis, Cake has continued to reinvent itself. The challenges associated with the implementation of the PSD2 regulations were addressed by a direct implementation of the Cake cashbacks in existing banking apps. This led to the launch of Cake for Banks early last year.

With this, Cake offers European banks plug and play solutions to integrate their cashback module into their own banking apps within a few weeks. This enables banks to provide an extra service to their customers, differentiate themselves from the competition and generate a new revenue stream on top of their existing business model by taking a commission on each cashback. Cake takes care of the offer of cashbacks and the administrative processing thereof with the commercial partners.

At the beginning of August, the first integration into an existing banking app was a fact. Under the name “Mooi Meereken van Cake”, all customers from the age of 16 of the banking and insurance group Argenta can opt to receive small refunds for purchases that they pay with their Argenta account at Cake’s partners. As soon as customers have activated the refunds in their trusted Argenta app, everything is automatic. So they don’t have to do anything.

Davy Kestens, CEO of Cake: “As a start-up, we are constantly looking for the right product-market fit. From the outset, we have opted for a flexible approach that keeps a close eye on the market. The successful launch at Argenta has confirmed that our Cake for Banks solutions meet a high demand from the market. Both from banks, bank customers and the commercial partners.”

This resulted in an exponential growth in the number of users of the Cake cashbacks, after which more and more commercial partners joined.

European Expansion
Now that Cake as a Belgian startup has arrived at a scalable business model, both for banks and companies, they are supported by Truffle Capital to further roll out this model within Europe. This French fintech VC is leading a new capital round of 4.6 million euros, supported by early-stage investors including Seeder Fund, Sambrinvest and Freshmen.

Patrick Lord, Senior Partner at Truffle Capital, said: “We are delighted to lead this new round of capital to support Cake’s international expansion. We believe Cake has managed to set up customer rewards in the most seamless, frictionless way while also banking To provide retailers with a marketing tool with an unprecedentedly high ROI with strong customer loyalty and data monetization. Cake’s approach is disruptive and it has everything it takes to become a global leader in this sector.”

The banking app for consumers, which Cake initially launched, will be closed from February and makes room for a full focus on banks and companies. Discussions are already underway with several national and international banks about integrating the Cake cashback platform into existing banking apps.

To support this further growth, Cake is also actively looking for additional employees, mainly in sales and account management.

Learn more at www.cake.app/banks – www.cake.app/business