After Some Revamping, Mogl Raises $11M for Nationwide Expansion

Jon Carder, Mogl, Mojo Pages, Client Shop, eHeaven

San Diego’s Mogl, founded almost four years ago as a Web-based restaurant loyalty program, has raised an additional $11 million in venture funding.

The startup plans to use the cash to expand beyond its existing market of six cities, which includes San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, into 14 additional metro areas—including New York, Boston, Houston, and Chicago. The move comes after Mogl revamped its business model and online technology.

Founder Jon Carder started Mogl as an online customer loyalty program for restaurants and bars, and now competes against such companies as San Francisco-based FiveStars, a Y Combinator startup that has raised nearly $43 million, including $26 million in September.

Under Mogl’s initial model, hospitality partners provided a cash-back reward (typically 10 percent) to customers who paid with a credit or debit card that the customer had registered on Mogl’s website. Mogl also “gameified” the program by enabling diners to donate all or part of their cash-back reward to a local food bank. The company made it possible for users to compete against their friends to see who could donate the most meals each month.

In recent interviews with VentureBeat and U-T San Diego, CEO Jon Carder said Mogl worked with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express this year so restaurants could vary the amount of their cash-back reward offers. Restaurants wanted more flexibility in varying the size of their rewards during peak and off-peak hours. (The company did not respond to an e-mail query from Xconomy.)

Mogl also revamped its technology so users could choose a charity for their donations, instead of sending all donations to the local food bank.

Mogl made some changes to its business model as well. The company initially took a small percentage of each customer’s tab. Mogl now charges each partner a flat $200 a month per customer—but only if the customer spends at least $200 at the restaurant.

Including the recent funding, Mogl has raised a total of roughly $26 million. Sysco, the multinational food conglomerate based in Houston, TX, became a new investor in the latest round. Existing investors Avalon Ventures, Sigma Partners, Austin Ventures, and Correlation Ventures also participated.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.