Australia-founded startup Checkmate raises $5 million to build a “centralised e-commerce experience”

An Australian designed personalised shopping tool that scours the web to find customers the best deals has received a major boost.

Checkmate, a retail technology startup co-founded by three Australians, has secured a $5 million seed funding round led by Fuel Capital.

Available as a mobile app/extension and laptop extension, the free tool gathers the best deals from a user’s personal email and the web, automatically applying them at checkout to help shoppers snag bargains.

Checkmate CEO Harry Dixon says being entrusted with the funds to build the platform he and co-founders Rory Garton-Smith and Elliot Rampono dreamed about is an “eerie feeling”.

“We’re quite proud of the type of money that we attracted,” he told SmartCompany.

“It’s kind of like this start of just crazy work.”

Checkmate aims to help brands reach new audiences and build loyalty, while helping customers by managing their orders, storing their gift cards and tracking deliveries.

Customers can also opt for a “ghost email inbox”, so they are signed to the top 100 retail and brand mailing lists for deals without having their inboxes inundated. The discounts are then applied automatically at checkout.

Dixon says the seed funding will be used to acquire users and test the market.

“We want to ultimately build a centralised e-commerce experience.”

The co-founders — all friends — were inspired after noticing industry privacy changes that limited how companies could market directly to customers.

“It had a massive repercussion on the industry as a whole, because it totally changed the way stores had to run their online marketing and address users,” said Garton-Smith, a former engineering project manager at Apple.

As a result, existing e-commerce tools weren’t working as well, as customers ignored or missed deals.

“We went ‘holy hell, there’s a massive opportunity here to build the next generation of savings products,” he said.

Dixon, a self-confessed “frugal” shopper who always waited for his personalised email deal before splashing on his next Converse sneakers, also thought a savings tool that automatically applied discounts at checkout would be “super helpful”.

US-based Checkmate has recently launched its smart shopping technology with Australia and the US primary markets.

Testing showed users engaged with Checkmate 3.5 times per week and saved more than 27% on average when buying, compared to about 15% with traditional savings apps.

Other participants in the seed funding round included former CEO of Ebates at Rakuten Kevin Johnson, f7 Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Hyper and Susa Ventures.