Honey Restarts Funding Talks

After its funding talks were put on hold earlier this year, Honey’s discussions to raise new funding appeared to have restarted. The company has previously held talks to raise approximately $100 million, Recode reported.

“Something came inbound that we’re seriously considering but not closed, so nothing to announce yet,” Honey Co-founder Ryan Hudson wrote. While Hudson had confirmed earlier talks to Recode back in February, the company had discontinued the talks to shift its attention to developing new products.

In February, Hudson had also told Recode that Honey was “cash-flow neutral.” It would only raise funds if the opportunity was too good not to take. The company has already notched $40 million in funding from firms such as Anthos Capital – and it has grown its staff over the past year from around 30 to 120 staffers.

The company is working on “a mobile version of the Honey shopping experience,” according to Hudson, which could launch before the holiday season. “If people think of us as a coupon-extension a year or two from now, we will have failed at execution.”

The news comes about two years after online cash-back shopping provider Ebates launched a cash-back button, a browser plug-in available for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, which tells consumers if an online store has a cash-back option the moment they visit, CNET reported. It provided an instant, less-intrusive way of notifying online shoppers of cash-back availability.

Once installed, users linked the button to an Ebates account, then proceeded with browsing online as they normally would. If they landed at a store or product page with a rebate available, the plug-in displayed a button with the cash-back percentage.

In 2016, Ebates invested $8 million in Influenster, a product-discovery and review platform, in a Series A round of funding. The funds, TechCrunch reported at the time, went toward scaling Influenster’s service in order to keep pace with its rapidly-expanding user base, as well as improving the platform’s ability to track the variety of products that are made available for customer review on its site and mobile app.