On Friday, magicpin, India’s largest platform for shopping and savings from local stores, raised over $5 million for the exchange of 2% equity shares, becoming the most valuable hyper-local app of the country.
Surprisingly, the investor we are talking about is one of the 10 million users of magicpin and he has also saved over 5 million dollars using the app for all his transactions and purchases. The magicpin founders were shocked to get this offer of 5 million dollars equivalent to the reward points in exchange for equity shares. This has never happened before.
The investor meet where this incident happened was organized at the Taj Hotel, Mumbai, where the investor paid only Rs. 1000 as he had the magicpin reward points to cover the balance of the hotel bill amount.
Speaking to The Fauxy, magicpin founder Anshoo Sharma said, “He played smart! The terms and conditions of magicpin usage reads – for their spending, users get rewarded in magicPoints that can be used to buy more services and experiences at magicpin–. He used those reward points to buy a stake in magicpin itself.”
Soon after the deal, magicpin updated its usage policy and added the condition that magicPoints cannot be used to purchase stake at magicpin.
In another incident that happened in Bengaluru, ED raided a software engineer in connection with a disproportionate assets case as ED was informed that the engineer had more savings than earnings. However, later ED learned that 90% of the engineer’s assets were in the form of magicpin reward points. In fact, few officials of the ED installed the application soon after they realised this and started using it for their personal transactions.
It’s a matter of time when people will start using magicPoints for all possible transactions and collect more magicPoints. The economic survey published by a leading media house says that by 2025, every Indian smartphone user will have magicpin installed on their phones.
