FinTech firm Hardbacon has acquired Simple Rate as it looks to consolidate its position in the rewards and credit cards space in Canada.
Created in 2019 by founder Paul Kim, Simple Rate is a financial products comparison website that is designed to teach Canadians how to use financial products and services. The website receives 20,000 unique visitors per month.
As a result of the transaction, in which the financial terms were not disclosed, Hardbacon will maintain the Simple Rate brand and update the platform with content aimed at helping Canadians with saving money.
Hardbacon will also deploy its own comparison tools on Simple Rate’s website, allowing visitors to compare credit cards, as well as other financial products such as mortgages, online brokers, savings accounts, and robo-advisors.
Montéal-based Hardbacon was initially launched in 2017 as an application for retail investors. It later pivoted to comparing financing planning, budgeting, and portfolio management and became a free app in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hardbacon claims over 100,000 monthly active users.
Hardbacon’s Simple Rate transaction marks its third acquisition since inception, following the company’s $15,000 purchase of Findmytotal.com, a financial calculator company from India. Hardbacon also previously acquired French-Canadian reward points specialist GratteCenne.
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All of these deals are part of Hardbacon’s growth strategy based on mergers and acquisitions that includes the integration of “specialized media properties in the field of personal finance,” according to the company.
To fuel these acquisitions, Hardbacon raised a series of funding rounds within the past couple of years. Last March, the company raised $1.1 million through equity crowdfunding platform FrontFundr. The company also previously closed a $680,884 seed round through FrontFundr in 2019. In June 2020, it received a $50,000 grant from the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program for an artificial intelligence research and development project aimed to predict stock prices.
Featured image courtesy Hardbacon
