The Offline Advantage

Today’s featured startup is turning digital fatigue into a growth opportunity through thoughtful gifting.

Project Overview

Let’s start with the important bit: Snappy just raised an additional $25 million in funding, bringing its total investment to an impressive $129.8 million. That alone should make the following pretty exciting.

Snappy is a corporate gifting platform that helps companies send physical gifts to their employees, clients, and partners.

The platform features a vast catalog of gift options. Companies can either choose a specific item or set a budget, allowing the recipient to select a gift themselves within that amount.

Here’s how it works: the recipient gets an email or SMS with a personalized message and a gift link. They follow the link, choose a gift, enter their address — and that’s it.

The beauty of Snappy lies in its scalability and simplicity. A company can upload a list of thousands of recipients with their contact details and gift budgets, and the platform handles the rest — from sending out the messages to tracking responses.

Even team leads or department heads can independently send gifts within pre-set budgets assigned by the company admin. Everything is tracked and transparent — including who received a message, who opened it, and who redeemed their gift.

Snappy also offers integrations with corporate systems to automate gifting. For example, it can automatically send birthday gifts to employees, pulling dates from the company’s HR system. Or it can gift new clients based on contract size, with data synced directly from the CRM.

To use Snappy, companies deposit the total gift budget upfront into their platform account. Delivery — to any of the 40 countries supported — is included in the gift price. If a gift isn’t claimed within a set timeframe, the unspent funds are refunded back to the company’s balance.

The basic version of Snappy is free. Advanced features like system integrations come with an annual fee of $999. The company’s main revenue source, however, comes from commissions paid by gift suppliers featured on the platform.

Although Snappy was born in Israel, it now serves an impressive 47% of Fortune 100 companies. Since its launch in 2015, it has delivered over 5 million gifts.

What’s the Gist?

So why has a seemingly “unsexy” startup like Snappy attracted so much funding? As always — it’s about market size.

The global corporate gifting market is valued at around $300 billion and continues to grow steadily. Average gift prices are increasing, too: the number of gifts priced over $150 has jumped by 50%, and those in the $100–$150 range have grown by 35%.

Interestingly, companies spend nearly equal amounts on gifts for clients and for employees.

Naturally, such a massive market has caught the attention of other startups as well.

In 2021, we covered &Open — a company with a similar model to Snappy — which raised $7.2 million at the time. Now, they send out 200,000 gifts annually, and their total funding has climbed to $35.4 million.

Another competitor, Evabot, initially offered a similar gifting platform but pivoted in 2022. It now focuses on AI tools for generating qualified leads.

Key Takeaways

This wave of physical gifting startups brings to mind another company — Audience — which we covered in 2022. Audience lets businesses send printed postcards to clients, with messages generated by an AI that mimics handwritten notes. That startup raised $10.5 million.

What connects Snappy, &Open, and Audience? They’re all revitalizing offline marketing channels. In a world saturated with digital noise, physical gestures — like a gift or a postcard — stand out.

Remember the days when mailboxes overflowed with flyers and catalogs? Today, it’s inboxes that are crammed with emails and promo offers. As digital channels become oversaturated, some businesses are turning back to physical outreach — where there’s suddenly less competition for attention.

At the same time, many companies are realizing that gifts often have more emotional impact than discounts. Think about it: which is more memorable — a $10 discount, or a thoughtful gift worth the same amount? As the saying goes, “It’s the thought that counts.”

Put all this together, and it becomes clear: physical gifting is a marketing channel perfectly suited to the current moment. While most companies are trying to lure people in online with discounts, others are quietly building loyalty and engagement offline — with a human touch.

It’s a fascinating inversion. Recently, we talked about SingleInterface, a startup helping brick-and-mortar stores attract online customers. Snappy, in contrast, is helping online companies win customers in the physical world.

And that shift opens up a broader trend: platforms that help businesses engage customers in offline spaces. Snappy and &Open are just the beginning.

So the next big question is:
What other offline marketing tactics could digital-first companies use — and what kinds of platforms could support them?

Company Info

Snappy

• Website: snappy.com

• Last round: $25M, 15.04.2024

• Total investment: $129.8M across 6 rounds