MILE HIGH CITY HOME TO A TECH “UNICORN”
Ibotta becomes only billiondollar startup in Denver.
Denver is now home to a unicorn. Not the mythical creature kind, but the supervaluable, privately held company variety.
Mobile shopping app Ibotta announced this week it’s now valued at $1 billion after the close of a recent nine-figure funding round headlined by Koch Disruptive Technologies, a subsidiary of Koch Industries.
Hitting that level of value — assessed by the investors who signed over the big checks, not the company itself — is an unprecedented feat for a Colorado-based company.
“By definition, unicorns are rare. However, they are not so rare anymore if you’re in Silicon Valley,” Rosanna Garcia, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, said Wednesday. “I think that’s the big difference for this company — they’re in Denver. They are the only ones. It is truly a rarity here.”
Ibotta — a play on the phrase “I bought a …” —launched in 2012. Its free app rewards shoppers for buying items from more than 1,500 leading brands and retailers that partner with the company, whether those purchases are made in-store or online. So far, its app has been downloaded more than 35 million times and has about 6 million active monthly users. Ibotta cuts customers in on its money-making deal with companies, shelling out $600 million in rewards to date, according to a news release.
Earlier this year, Ibotta edged into the mobile payment space, launching “Pay with Ibotta.” That service allows shoppers to pay for stuff they buy at about 75 national retail chains and on about 100 websites directly through the app, with more compa-
nies being added, company officials say.
The expansion is part of Ibotta founder and CEO Bryan Leach‘s ambitious goal.
“We want to make every purchase in the world rewarding,” he says. “We want to make the moment of payment really resonate emotionally.”
The company celebrated reaching unicorn status with a little theater. Its CTO last week donned a purple unicorn costume to deliver the news to some of Ibotta’s approximately 500 employees at its Denver headquarters.
Leach said he plans to plow the undisclosed sum raised into more growth, aiming to hire another 200 or so workers in the coming two to three years.
The Denver Post earlier this year named the company a “Top Workplace.”
“We’re a fast-paced workplace that is dreaming very big,” Leach said. “We want to say to the world, ‘Look, we are going to compete with all of the major digital payment companies in the world, and if you want to be part of that and not live where those companies are based, but come to Colorado, we’re here.’ ”
Ibotta’s mythic achievement could benefit many other companies, DU’s Garcia says.
“It’s a signal for investors to start looking in Denver for those types of companies that can grow into a billion-dollar valuation,” she said. “Not just in tech, but in health care, any kind of industry that is in an upward trend.”