Gift Card Marketplaces Raise Grabs $56 Million From NEA And Others
A company offering a marketplace where consumers can buy and sell their unused gift cards, Raise.com, announced this morning it has taken in a sizable $56 million round of Series B funding, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA).
Context & Ripple Effects
Raise's $56 million Series B is one of the first large institutional bets on the secondary gift-card market — a marketplace where consumers unload unused cards at a discount. The thesis aged well: two years later the company followed up with a $60 million Series C that brought in Accel and PayPal, alongside a stated push to turn the marketplace into a mobile wallet for gift cards.
The broader gifting stack was attracting capital around the same arc — Loop Commerce's e-gifting checkout service for retailers raised $16 million months after this round, and later merchant-side plays like Nift's cross-promotion gift cards kept the category funded.
First-order effects
- NEA converts its conviction into a lead position in Raise, giving the marketplace capital to deepen liquidity on both sides — buyers hunting discounts, sellers stuck with unwanted cards.
- Raise gains the balance sheet to compete for inventory and trust in a market where consumers must be convinced a third-party resold card is safe to buy.
Second-order effects
- PayPal's later appearance in Raise's Series C signals that payments networks see resale wallets as distribution, forcing traditional card issuers to decide whether discounted resale is a threat channel or a partner one.
- Merchants whose cards trade below face value on Raise's marketplace face pressure to treat resale pricing as de facto dynamic pricing of their own brand currency.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern from marketplace to mobile wallet holds, gift cards shift from static plastic liabilities on retailer balance sheets to programmable stored-value assets that ride consumer wallet apps — a structure adjacent fintech rounds like Marqeta's and Ramp's suggest the industry is building infrastructure around anyway.
The trend: Secondary gift-card marketplaces are consolidating into wallet-style fintech platforms, with payment networks and growth investors following the money from resale fees toward stored-value infrastructure.