PayPal to acquire Honey, a comparison shopping and rewards platform that has 17M MAUs, for ~$4B
PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash.
TechCrunchSarah Perez
Context & Ripple Effects
Honey is the biggest swing in a run of PayPal tuck-ins that began with Hyperwallet for payouts infrastructure and Simility for AI-based fraud scoring — both nine-figure deals bolted onto the payment flow itself. Honey is different in kind: at $4 billion it buys the moment *before* a transaction starts, not the plumbing around it.
The strategic logic was spelled out in later coverage of the deal as a bet on the affiliate model and loyalty programs — PayPal wants to control the starting point of a transaction alongside the payment endpoint it already owns. The arc didn't stop there: five years on, Honey's transaction data feeds PayPal Ads, and PayPal has since floated even larger commerce acquisitions like a reported $39B approach to Pinterest.
First-order effects
PayPal gains 17M monthly active users who sit at the deal-finding stage of shopping, plus Honey's affiliate commission stream — revenue that arrives before a single PayPal button is clicked.
Second-order effects
Merchants and affiliate networks now face a wallet-sized gatekeeper deciding which coupons and offers get surfaced pre-checkout, shifting pricing power over promotions toward whoever owns the discovery layer.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, payments companies consolidate into full commerce intermediaries — intent capture, loyalty, ads — with the PayPal Ads launch and the Pinterest approach showing the same strategy compounding rather than staying a one-off.
The trend: Payment providers are buying their way upstream to the start of the purchase, converting wallets into shopping-intent and advertising businesses.
Some stats on Honey, which Paypal just acquired for $4B: • Saved $1B for users this year • Currently at $100M in revenue growing >100% y/y and profitable • Works with 30K merchants and has 17M MAU (valuing it at roughly ~$230/user) • Only raised ~$40M prior to acquisition
Paypal is buying @honey, a coupon search browser plugin, for $4 billion is the surprise of the year. Interesting to see a browser plugin that expensive and synergy with Paypal is questionable. 🤔 Especially since Paypal spent $800M for Venmo/Braintree. https://techcrunch.com/...
hi sorry nerdy question for nerds cant google (or i guess apple) murder honey with a browser update or is fear of antitcompetitive maneuvering the insurance here https://techcrunch.com/...
This is why platforms like Facebook are “free.” For 99% of people, your data is your most valuable asset. The 99% give it away and the 1% collect it and make billions. https://twitter.com/...
Amazing outcome for the Honey team and product. Though I wonder if PayPal could have gotten a better deal if they had used Honey when they were making this purchase https://twitter.com/...
i really love M&A done right, and this is a perfect example of that. Honey is a fantastic company and product, and PayPal is the perfect home for it. https://twitter.com/...
PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B - FOUR BILLION!!!! (after ONLY raising $49M) - https://techcrunch.com/... via @techcrunch
A VC friend just showed me their internal note from March 2015 talking about Honey having *incredible* traction and raising $500K @ 12M cap. They couldn't get there because they felt the valuation was too high 😬 https://twitter.com/...
This is a big win for the @honey team and LA tech scene. Special shoutout to my guy @ketau. The journey was long, but you got it done. https://techcrunch.com/...
Biggest acquisition to date. $4bn is massive. Honey is a nice service. Attach to Chrome and it will help you save $ every time you shop online. Deal let's PayPal get into the consumer's mind before purchase stage. https://twitter.com/...
Wow, PayPal's biggest acquisition to date (more than Braintree+Venmo btw, which was $800m). Mostly cash too. Also went unreported for awhile (and not in this article), but Joanne Bradford from SoFi joined Honey as President a few months ago https://techcrunch.com/...