In 2022, Hussein Fazal flew 200 of his employees to Las Vegas to cash a $200 check at a payday loan shop. He then asked them to buy a week of groceries for a family on what was left so they could understand their customers’ experience. His company, Super.com was worth approximately $700 million at the time.
Super.com, is now a $1.2 billion company with around 300 employees. The Toronto-founded savings app for everyday Americans, raised $65 million Series D led by TPG, Fortune learned exclusively. The raise comes as the company surpasses $200 million in net revenue, grew over 50% year-over-year, and turned profitable.
The app functions like a Costco membership crossed with a financial services toolkit. For a $15 monthly fee, members get up to 40% off hotels, cashback on everyday purchases, prescription discounts, cash advances when they’re short, and credit-building tools. The company’s Super+ membership is approaching one million members and has helped customers put over $1 billion back in their pockets.
Premium credit card rewards programs—the Amex Platinums, the Chase Sapphire Reserves—are designed for high earners with high credit scores. All the while, lower-income consumers using debit or secured cards subsidize those rewards without seeing any of them. Fazal built Super+ to flip that. “There are 100 to 150 million Americans in that everyday American category, under $100,000 household income, and we’re trying to do our best to help them save,” he told me.
The company started as SnapTravel in 2016, a hotel-booking bot, before COVID nearly killed it. Fazal survived, and in doing so, identified his true customer base: people booking two-star hotels where his $10 discount was the difference between taking the trip or not, mostly paying with debit because they couldn’t get a credit card.
Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s president, joined as board observer and put in his own personal money: “Super.com is doing something that’s almost the opposite of Amazon Prime,” Finkelstein told me. “Amazon made spending frictionless for people with means. Super.com is making savings frictionless for the 100 million Americans living paycheck to paycheck.” He called Fazal’s “give-a-shit quotient” one of the highest of any founder he’d ever met.
The round also brings Ryan Fujiu, ex-CPO of Bird and former head of driver growth at Uber, to lead product, and Michele Lee, former general counsel at Pinterest, as GC. And Super.com is NASCAR’s official savings partner, putting Super.com in front of 70 million fans who look a lot like the customer Fazal described to me from a tent at the Michigan Speedway: a guy who just needed a hotel for $60, found one, booked it on the spot, and went to tell his friends.
The personal finance apps market is projected to balloon from $31.7 billion to $173.6 billion by 2035, and the competition is intensifying: Rakuten, Capital One Shopping, and now-public Chime all want the same wallet share. Fazal is aiming exceptionally high. “I’d love every American to have Amazon Prime, Costco, and Super+ as the essential memberships that help them save time and money,” he said.
VENTURE DEALS
– Even Realities, a Shenzhen, China-based developer of smart glasses, raised $150 million in pre-Series B funding. Meituan and Tencent led the round.
– Bespoke Labs, a Mountain View, Calif.-based AI agent training platform, raised $40 million across seed and Series A rounds from Wing VC, Mayfield, The House Fund, and others.
– Katalyze AI, a San Francisco-based agentic operating system for pharmaceutical manufacturing and quality operations, raised $10.5 million in seed funding. Bonfire Ventures led the round and was joined by Inovia Capital, Ripple Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and angel investors.
– Worldmodeldata, a Cambridge, U.K.-based company building a database of video game-generated training data for AI, raised £7 million ($9.4 million) in seed funding. Iona Star Capital led the round.
– TaiSan, a Cambridge, U.K.-based developer of sodium-ion batteries for applications like electric bikes and scooters, raised £4.7 million ($6.3 million) in funding. EOS Advisory and Mercia Ventures led the round and were joined by AFI Ventures, EverQuest Capital Partners, and others.
PRIVATE EQUITY
– Jenson Hughes, a portfolio company of Gryphon Investors, acquired HiLT, a Singapore-based fire protection engineering firm. Financial terms were not disclosed.
EXITS
– Novartis agreed to acquire Myricx Bio, a London, U.K.-based drug discovery company focused on patients with cancer, from Sofinnova Partners, for up to $1.5 billion.
– Blackstone Energy Transition Partners agreed to acquire Dresser Utility Solutions, a Houston, Texas-based provider of mission-critical natural gas and water measurement, control and infrastructure equipment solutions, from First Reserve. Financial terms were not disclosed.
IPOs
– Csquare, a Coppell, Texas-based data center operator, plans to raise up to $1.35 billion in an offering of 50 million shares priced between $23 and $27 on the New York Stock Exchange. The company posted $1 billion in sales for the year ended March 31. Brookfield Corporation backs the company.
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