St. Pete tech company raises $11M in Series A round

St. Petersburg-based SKUx, a blockchain-based startup focusing on the fintech sector, has raised $11 million in a Series A funding round. 

SKUx’s Series A round was led by a “strategic family office investor” focused on fintech and payments. New York-based Advection Growth Capital also had significant participation in the round among other strategic investors in the consumer goods, retail and health care industries, according to the company’s Tuesday announcement. 

To date, the company has raised $22 million. It previously raised $11 million in a seed round. 

SKUx has a patented platform, SKUPay, which combines first-party data, mobile branding and secure digital payments to deliver incremental revenues and real-time transparency for merchants, brands and payment partners. SKUx recently launched the program through Apple Pay. 

“If you think about the typical experience of payments with traditional plastic cards and the current use of digital cards, we are creating that same experience in a more streamlined way, but for specific products,” said SKUx president and co-founder Bobby Tinsley. “You can take your card out and swipe it for a merchant, but a program is set up through the provider/card issuer for this specific product, which can authorize or decline the transaction based on eligibility.” 

For example, a health care provider could approve a transaction for a person to buy healthier foods and also decline certain product purchases such as tobacco. 

“This is a huge opportunity for Medicaid or government disbursements to control spending on specific items,” Tinsley said. 

SKUx will funnel the Series A funding to continue scaling the SKUPay product. 

“We are delighted to be invested in SKUx with our capital, advisory services and our network of investors and operators,” Greg Kennedy, the founder and managing partner of Advection Growth Capital, said in a news release. “We are particularly pleased to have introduced [our] board of advisors’ member Trisha Asgeirsson to SKUx to help drive the go-to-market for SKUPay. SKUx’s product-based payments deliver cost efficiencies, better data, more effective promotions, and an improved customer experience – across payment networks, retailers, consumer product companies and end consumers. SKUx is precisely the kind of transformational company Advection seeks to support and to help grow.”

Tinsley said Kennedy has been an “amazing asset to us from a building capital and a strong network perspective.” 

“The next wave of announcements from SKUx will be about us partnering with a wave of large financial instuitions across the country that are undertaking a digital transformation,” Tinsley said.