It’s been over a year since St. Petersburg fintech startup SKUx raised $11 million in its Series A funding round.
In that time, the company has expanded its employee base and migrated to a new office in St. Pete. Meanwhile, it has closed partnerships with Fortune 500 companies and expanded its user base. Founder and President Bobby Tinsley said the moves started a scaling process with global potential.
“When you start a company, you’re in the ideation stage, finding product market fit, which is a lot of the early work,” Tinsley said. “Going from that idea seed stage into growth stage and scale, that’s where we are right now.”
The company sells a set of purchasing technologies but is focused on two products: a business-to-consumer digital payments platform and a service for delivering virtual gift cards.
This month, it signed a partnership agreement with Visa, a multinational public payments firm. The move will introduce SKUx payment technology into various merchant and consumer situations, according to a release.
“We are working with [Visa] to have [digital payments] be an interconnected experience, a Visa and SKUx experience, from the beginning all the way to the end,” Tinsley said. “Becoming part of the fabric of a massive company like Visa enables us to do cool things and opens up broader doors for us that we couldn’t open ourselves at our stage.”
In February, the company began working with multinational snack food firm Mondelez through the Hedera Governing Council, a cryptocurrency membership group and network. SKUx’s work with Mondelez started with adding efficiencies to the product recall and rebate service. The service cuts a three-week mailing process to a few minutes of digital interaction, Tinsley said. It has expanded since.
The company has also hired over a dozen new employees in the past year, including Trisha Asgeirsson as chief revenue officer in 2023. Asgeirsson, previously an adviser to the company, has more than two decades of experience working at Mastercard.
To accommodate the expanding team, SKUx moved its office from the Tampa Bay Innovation Center to Thrive DTSP, a larger coworking space at 136 4th St. N.
Tinsley said the company will continue to focus on revenue and scaling and hopes to add more partnerships.
“We set out to build something for where we are right now, and that framework and foundation are coming through daily,” Tinsley said. “We’re surfing that wave, as you would say, and continuing to build the team around us. It’s all about talent — bringing in the right people and the right companies to drive success.”
