The Team Behind the $1.3B Grocery-Linked Finance Platform Is Building the Open Network for U.S. Grocers

We are building the open financial value network for grocery.

Grocery is one of the most trusted relationships in a household’s life. Every week, families return to the same stores, buy the products they need most, and feel the cost of living in real time. But the financial value created around that spend is fragmented. Payments move through one system. Rewards sit in another. Offers expire somewhere else. Retail media sees exposure, but often cannot prove purchase.

This is not a thesis we learned from the outside. Members of our team helped build and scale the grocery-linked financial products behind PC Financial, which EQ Bank acquired from Loblaw for $1.3B.

Across Loblaw, PC Financial, Walmart, Instacart, Upside, RBC, Toast, Shipt, and Uplift, we have worked on and around the systems behind grocery, consumer finance, loyalty, payments, offers, retail media, attribution, and commerce infrastructure. We have seen how rare closed-loop enterprise systems create value when these pieces work together.

But consumers do not live inside one closed-loop system. They shop across grocers, pharmacies, restaurants, travel, subscriptions, local merchants, and everyday categories. The payment travels with them. The value does not.

Cashberry is building the open version for grocery. Wherever a shopper uses Cashberry, value can be created, verified, attributed, and returned to the shopper, the grocer, or the merchant.

Most grocers sit at the center of one of the highest-frequency financial relationships in a household, but they do not have the infrastructure to capture, connect, or return the value created around that relationship.

Why It’s a Problem

Households already manage money around grocery because it's their most frequent essential expense. FMI reports that American households make 2.8 grocery shopping trips per week, which makes grocery more than a purchase moment. It is a repeated financial routine. The problem is that grocers are mostly excluded from the financial layer around that behavior. The bank owns the account. The card network owns the payment economics. The loyalty platform owns the offer logic. The ad platform owns the measurement. The grocer is left with the basket, while the larger financial relationship around that basket lives somewhere else.

Closed-loop systems show what is possible when payments, loyalty, offers, rewards, media, and attribution work together. But only a rare group of enterprise retailers can build that inside their own walls. Most grocers cannot. And even when a closed-loop system works, the consumer still spends most of their life outside of it. They move across merchants, categories, apps, wallets, cards, and loyalty programs. Every disconnected transaction creates another place where value is lost, missed, misattributed, or never returned.

We estimate that more than $50B in annual value is trapped, wasted, or never returned because payments, rewards, offers, loyalty, media, and attribution do not work together. Across 200M U.S. grocery shoppers, that is the equivalent of $250 per shopper per year sitting outside the grocer’s reach. The value exists. It is just disconnected.

In the U.S. alone, there are more than 45,000 supermarkets, and most do not have the resources to build a bank, card program, rewards network, retail media business, and attribution layer on their own. That is why Cashberry exists.

Closed-loop retailers built the value engine for themselves. Cashberry is building the open financial value network for everyone else in grocery.

What We Built

Vault AI connects the commerce systems grocers already run: loyalty, payments, offers, receipts, retail media, ecommerce, and customer data. Work that once took months can move in days. Executives can see where value is moving, which customer segments are responding, which campaigns are working, and what to do next.

Branch is the managed financial program for grocers. It lets them co-brand and distribute consumer financial products inside the Cashberry mobile app, without building banking infrastructure themselves.

Treasury is the campaign and rewards layer. It helps merchants and vendors fund offers, manage rewards, measure performance, and prove outcomes.

Together, Vault AI, Branch, and Treasury give grocers the infrastructure to launch financial products, activate shoppers, manage funded value, and measure revenue impact.

Why Now

The market is ready because the pressure is coming from every side at once. Consumers need visible savings on essential spend. Grocers need new revenue beyond the basket. Merchants want measurable outcomes, not disconnected impressions and clicks. Retail media has trained the market to value purchase-linked audiences. Fintech infrastructure makes banking-powered products easier to launch. The pieces now exist. The account. The card. The offer. The reward. The audience. The attribution. What is missing is the network that connects them back to grocery.

Why We’re Raising

We are opening this round to convert $500K in contracted ARR from grocery partners into the operating proof needed to scale with larger grocers.

The round moves Cashberry from signed partner demand to live shopper activation, payment-volume data, referenceable launches, integration learnings, and the enterprise deployment requirements for Branch, Treasury, and Vault AI.

It is the step from early grocery contracts to a repeatable enterprise model.

What This Unlocks

Design partners give Cashberry the proof to expand with larger grocers, deploy enterprise tooling, and move from early partnerships into enterprise network economics.

Within 12 months of the next financing round, our target is to scale toward 200,000 recurring members, $3.8B in annualized payment volume, and $31M in annualized retained revenue. At a 3x revenue multiple, that supports a $93M valuation and a 6x+ step-up from this round.

This round proves the model. The next round scales the network.

The Invitation

We are looking for investors who understand that grocery is becoming a financial, loyalty, and commerce network. Grocery is more than a retail category. It is a distribution channel, a financial relationship, a data layer, and one of the most important consumer touch points in everyday life.