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The Joko Story
In 2018, three founders left successful tracks at Criteo, Jumia, and Happn to build something that, at the time, looked deceptively simple: a mobile app that would automatically reward users for their everyday purchases, in-store and online, by leveraging PSD2 open banking data.
Nicolas Salat-Baroux, Xavier Starkloff, and Alexandre Hollocou brought a rare combination to the table: deep engineering chops, consumer product instincts, and an obsession with team quality from day one. Within months of incorporation in late 2018, they were running fifteen people out of Station F, surrounded by ex-Criteo machine learning engineers.
That early signal — the founders' insistence on building a brilliant squad before scaling anything else — was what convinced Axeleo Capital to participate in the first institutional round alongside Partech and Lafayette Plug & Play. The pre-seed of €1.6M closed in mid-2019.
Eric Burdier, Founding Partner at Axeleo Capital, remembers the early read:
“Joko's founders natively understood that the key to their success lay in building a brilliant squad from day one. This path, not always easy for young startup founders, is the reason why they will succeed.”
Seven years on, the conviction holds. What the founders built, day after day, is a team culture of high standards, hands-on coaching, and shared ambition — the kind that compounds over time and turns a clean idea into a global platform.
The Tech Edge: PSD2 and Machine Learning at the Core
What set Joko apart was not the cashback promise — many had tried that — but the underlying technology. Joko had built a proprietary transaction categorization and merchant identification engine that could detect bank transactions at partner brands with unprecedented accuracy, fully automatically, in-store as well as online. In France, where 90% of consumer spending was still happening in physical retail at the time, this was a structural unlock.
For brands, the proposition was equally clean: a pay-per-sale acquisition channel measurable down to the offline transaction, with no fraud risk and no attribution debate. For users, it was effortless — connect a card once, get rewarded forever.
Scaling Up and Reaching Critical Mass
Joko raised €10M with Partech and Axeleo Capital in October 2020. By the time the round closed, the company had crossed 500,000 users, 1,000+ retailer partnerships (Apple, Nike, Carrefour, Uniqlo, H&M, Leroy Merlin, Galeries Lafayette, ManoMano, Decathlon), and €1M+ in cashback distributed. The capital fueled three priorities: doubling the team, deepening the product, and starting the international expansion.
The company has since transformed. Joko has scaled its proposition from a French cashback app into what the team now describes as the world's first universal shopping app: a free platform combining cash back, automatic coupon codes, price tracking, and discount discovery across 7,500+ merchants worldwide.
The growth has been substantial. The product is live in the US with a dedicated US-based support team, available as a mobile app on iOS and Android, a browser extension on Chrome and Safari mobile, and a web platform. Joko now reports more than 6 million users boosting their purchasing power through the platform, across shopping, travel, groceries, fashion, tech, beauty, and home categories.
Why This Deal Matters
Joko is the kind of long-cycle conviction deal that defines a fund. The bet was placed at pre-seed on three founders, a technical edge built on then-emerging open banking infrastructure, and a consumer category that most B2B investors avoided. Seven years in, the company has scaled from a French cashback app to a multi-market shopping platform with millions of active users and a presence on both sides of the Atlantic.
What makes the model durable is that it works on both sides. For partner retailers and brands, Joko is a performance acquisition channel measured at the transaction level — online and in-store — with no fraud risk and no attribution debate. For users, the next frontier is now opening: Joko is investing heavily in a GenAI-powered universal shopping assistant, built on LLMs, semantic search, and a proprietary product catalog, designed to deliver a level of personalized shopping experience that no incumbent currently offers.
“The Joko story is what early-stage investing is supposed to look like. You back the right founders, you stay close through the hard years, and you let them turn a clean idea into a platform.” noticed Eric.