(L-R) Bundle co-founders Bader Al Kalooti and Mostafa Wanas
For small businesses, customer rewards are often a frustrating trade-off. A discount can bring in a buyer, but it eats into margin. Cashback can nudge a transaction, but it is now so common that many consumers barely notice it. Larger companies can absorb the cost of eye-catching giveaways or loyalty campaigns; most SMEs cannot.
Bundle, a rewards infrastructure startup, is trying to change that model by letting brands pool their incentive budgets into shared reward pools. The company has raised US$5.5 million in pre-seed funding led by Ethereal Ventures and Further Ventures, with the capital earmarked for product development, regulatory coverage, strategic partnerships, and market launches across Asia.
Also Read: How AI and blockchain could make commerce decisions more accountable
The platform plans to roll out first in Singapore, the Philippines, and Vietnam, where more than 50 founding brands have joined ahead of launch. Bundle said it intends to expand across Asia before moving into other global markets, using what it describes as a compliance-first operating model.
At its simplest, Bundle is a networked rewards platform. Instead of each company running a separate campaign with its own modest prizes, participating brands contribute to a larger common pool. Customers earn Bundle tickets by taking eligible actions, such as making a purchase, referring a friend, or completing another campaign objective. Those tickets give them access to shared rewards that would typically be too expensive for a single small business to fund alone.
Why rewards need a rethink
The pitch is landing at a time when SMEs across Southeast Asia face a difficult marketing environment. Digital advertising costs have risen over the past decade, while consumers are harder to retain across crowded e-commerce, food, travel, fintech, and lifestyle apps. Promotions remain a common lever, but repeated discounting can train customers to wait for deals rather than build loyalty.
That problem is particularly sharp in Southeast Asia, where SMEs make up the overwhelming majority of businesses and remain central to employment and economic output. Across Asia Pacific, SMEs account for nearly all businesses and contribute around 40 per cent of national economic output, according to figures cited by Bundle from the Asian Development Bank’s Asia Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise Monitor 2025.
In that context, a shared rewards network could give smaller companies access to a type of marketing mechanic usually reserved for large consumer brands. The challenge is whether customers find pooled rewards compelling enough to change behaviour, and whether brands can measure the uplift clearly against other acquisition tools.
Bundle said early tests suggest there is demand. During a pilot across five markets with five companies, the platform rewarded more than 1,100 winners and distributed over US$1000,000 in rewards, including a top reward of US$50,000 The company said participating brands saw conversion uplifts of up to four times compared with traditional promotional campaigns.
Those numbers are still early, and pilots can be easier to optimise than full commercial rollouts. But they point to the core behavioural bet behind Bundle: that consumers may respond more strongly to the chance of earning a meaningful reward than to another small discount.
Also Read: From transparency to impact: The role of blockchain in socially responsible marketing
“For decades, brands have relied on discounts and cashback to attract customers. Yet, customer acquisition costs continue to rise, conversion rates continue to decline, and businesses sacrifice billions of dollars in margins every year on incentives that customers increasingly ignore,” said Bundle co-founder and CEO Bader Al Kalooti. “People do not get excited by another small discount; they are motivated by the opportunity to earn something meaningful.”
Blockchain in the background
Bundle’s investors frame the company as part of a newer wave of blockchain-enabled consumer businesses, though the product appears designed to keep the technical layer largely invisible to end users. In practice, “blockchain rails” could help support transparent reward tracking, settlement, or interoperability across partners, but the mainstream customer experience will likely depend less on the underlying technology and more on whether campaigns are easy to understand and redeem.
Min Teo, Managing Partner at Ethereal Ventures, said Bundle uses “shared rewards and blockchain rails to help brands drive loyalty and customer growth at scale”. Further Ventures Partner Robbie Nakarmi added that the model could give brands “access to larger rewards to drive higher conversions from their marketing campaigns at a fraction of the cost”.
For Southeast Asia, that distinction matters. The region has seen strong crypto adoption in markets such as Vietnam and the Philippines, but consumer-facing blockchain products have also faced scepticism, especially where the value proposition feels speculative or too technical. Bundle’s ability to position blockchain as infrastructure rather than a headline feature may be important as it courts SMEs outside Web3-native circles.
Regulation will be another factor. Rewards, prize draws, incentives, and promotional campaigns can fall under different rules depending on the market. Singapore, the Philippines, and Vietnam each have their own requirements around consumer promotions, marketing, payments, and data handling. Bundle said part of the new funding will go into expanding regulatory coverage, a necessary step if it wants brands to run campaigns across multiple jurisdictions through one platform.
The competitive landscape
Bundle sits at the intersection of loyalty software, promotional technology, and cashback alternatives. Globally, companies such as Antavo, Talon.One, Voucherify, Yotpo Loyalty, and Smile.io help brands build loyalty, referral, and incentive programmes. In Southeast Asia, adjacent players include cashback and rewards platforms such as ShopBack and Fave, which have trained consumers to expect money-back offers and merchant-funded incentives.
Bundle’s difference is that it is not simply giving each merchant a loyalty tool or cashback channel. Its bet is on aggregation: many brands contributing to shared prize pools to create rewards that feel larger than what each could offer alone. That also means its real competition may include the status quo — discount codes, marketplace vouchers, bank card promotions, and platform-led campaigns from major e-commerce and super-app players.
Founded by Al Kalooti and Mostafa Wanas, Bundle brings together experience from consumer technology, e-commerce, and crypto. Al Kalooti previously held leadership roles at Amazon and Binance, where he served as Head of MENASA and Turkey, after multiple venture-backed startup exits. Wanas has advised and scaled digital products and consumer technology companies.
The company’s next test will be execution. Convincing 50 founding brands to join ahead of rollout gives Bundle a starting network, but networked products only become valuable when both sides — brands and consumers — return repeatedly. For SMEs, the appeal will be measurable customer acquisition at predictable cost. For consumers, it will be whether Bundle tickets feel like a genuine chance at something worthwhile, not another layer of marketing noise.
Also Read: Can blockchain function as a medium for social good and digital philanthropy?
If Bundle can solve both sides, it may offer a new route for smaller brands in Southeast Asia to compete for attention without burning margin on endless discounts. If it cannot, it risks becoming one more promotional tool in a region already full of them.
The post Bundle raises US$5.5M to help Asian SMEs pool rewards budgets appeared first on e27.