PayPal acquired Honey, a company that had annual revenue of roughly $100M for $4B in 2019, which raised some eyebrows.
Honey is now called Honey by PayPal and Arkose was brought in sometime last year to fight fraud on the Honey shopping and rewards platform.
“Honey, which works with retailers such as Macy’s and Sephora and with marketplaces such as eBay, has become integral to PayPal’s strategy to improve the chance of its payments app and Venmo to be the top choice of shoppers for payments.
Since Honey’s service encourages users to regularly engage to search for price reductions on e-commerce sites, there’s a “check-in” effect that PayPal wishes to promote among its users.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group