Serena Williams Backs $5M Round in Bitcoin Rewards Startup Lolli

Bitcoin rewards company Lolli has raised $5 million from a cast of notable investors.

Announced Wednesday, Lolli’s pre-Series A round features Serena Williams' Serena Ventures, her husband Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six and Night Media, the management company that represents YouTuber MrBeast.

Other investors from the influencer ranks include Casey Neistat, Phil DeFranco, Cody Ko, Noel Miller, Ian Borthwick and Gabriel Leydon.

Last year Lolli raised a $3 million seed round led by PathFinder, with participation from Digital Currency Group (CoinDesk’s owner), Michelle Phan and Ashton Kutcher.

Bitcoin is on a bull run and crypto is booming, so firms with a sturdy enough use case to have toughed it through the bear winter are making hay while the sun shines. Lolli, which incentivizes shoppers to go to its partner stores with bitcoin rewards sent to a wallet, now boasts over 1,000 merchants and 250,000 users.

Read more: Ashton Kutcher and Michelle Phan Invest in Lolli’s $3M Seed Round

Lolli co-founder Alex Adelman says the company currently offers an average of 7% bitcoin-back rewards at retailers such as Kroger, Microsoft, Booking.com and Ulta. Lolli users have earned more than $3 million in bitcoin rewards to date, Adelman said.

“We started out with the idea of educating people about bitcoin,” Adelman said in an interview. “So we just attached it to something that everybody does: shop. People think about investing when they think about bitcoin, but there's probably less than 1% of the world that would consider themselves investors. Everybody would consider themselves a shopper.”

The ultimate goal is financial empowerment and financial inclusion, said Adelman, which are also key reasons Serena Williams and her team support Lolli.

“I'm excited to announce my investment in Lolli, a company on a mission to make bitcoin more accessible,” Williams said in a statement. “Earning and owning bitcoin is a step towards financial inclusivity for all people.”

Bitcoin reaching all-time highs recently close to $60,000 is also great news for an app built upon stacking sats.

“They say for a technology to be transformative, you need to be 10 times better than the predecessor,” said Adelman. “Since we launched, bitcoin has gone up by 11 or 12 times, so 10 times better than any cashback program out there.”