Gift card marketplace Raise raises $60M Series C from Accel, PayPal, and others, will focus on building a mobile wallet for gift cards
Raise, which lets consumers buy and sell gift cards online, has raised $60 million in its pursuit to become a mobile payments company.
Context & Ripple Effects
Raise has been circling this pivot since its $56M round in early 2015, when it was still framed as a two-sided marketplace for discounted gift cards. The new $60M Series C — with PayPal joining Accel on the cap table — marks the shift from taking a cut of resale transactions to owning where gift cards live: a mobile wallet.
PayPal's participation is the strategic tell. A marketplace monetizes occasional trades; a wallet monetizes stored value continuously, which is exactly the asset class PayPal already operates at scale.
First-order effects
- PayPal gains an equity stake in a consumer surface for stored value outside its own checkout flow, hedging against disintermediation of its wallet by newer payment apps.
- Raise's business model changes immediately: revenue logic moves from per-transaction marketplace fees toward wallet engagement, redemption frequency, and balance float.
Second-order effects
- Merchant-side players like Nift — whose cross-promotion gift card network raised $16.5M the following year — now compete with Raise over who controls the gift card relationship: the issuing merchant or the consumer's wallet.
- Gift card issuers and retailers gain a new distribution channel but also a new gatekeeper; if Raise's wallet aggregates balances across brands, it captures the redemption data merchants currently own.
Third-order effects
- If wallets keep absorbing stored-value instruments like gift cards, the wallet operator becomes the permission layer deciding which brands reach consumers at redemption time — consolidating leverage that today sits with individual retailers.
- The pattern suggests secondary-marketplaces for financial instruments (gift cards here, savings products elsewhere) tend to graduate into full wallet plays once capital arrives, forcing incumbents to either invest in them or compete with them.
The trend: Stored-value products such as gift cards are being absorbed into mobile wallets, with investors betting that whoever holds the wallet controls redemption, data, and the customer relationship.