PayPal to acquire Honey Science Corporation for $4bn

PayPal announced late on Wednesday a deal to acquire Honey Science Corporation for $4.0bn.

Honey, a platform for shopping and rewards offering money-saving tools to track prices, get alerts, make lists, browse offers and participate in an Ebates-like rewards program called Honey Gold, currently had 17.0m monthly active users. Its users tended to be younger millennial shoppers, both male and female.

PayPal aims to add Honey’s technology to its own product line, expanding its reach to PayPal’s 300.0m users.

“What’s exciting is that we can take the functionality Honey now offers — which is product discovery, price tracking, offers and loyalty — and build that into the PayPal and Venmo experiences,” explained PayPal SVP of Global Consumer Products and Technology, and former Xoom CEO, John Kunze.

“When Honey says they’re putting money in the pockets of their customers — that’s perfectly in line with what we want to do. We want to make digital commerce and financial services more affordable, easier to use, more fun and more accessible to people around the world,” he said.

Dan Schulman, president and CEO of PayPal said in a statement: “Honey is amongst the most transformative acquisitions in PayPal’s history. It provides a broad portfolio of services to simplify the consumer shopping experience, while at the same time making it more affordable and rewarding.”

“The combination of Honey’s complementary consumer products with our platform will significantly enhance our ability to drive engagement and play a more meaningful role in the daily lives of our consumers. As a partner of choice for our merchants, this is another way that we can help them build and strengthen their customer relationships, provide personalized offers, and drive incremental sales. The combination of Honey and PayPal adds another significant and meaningful dimension to our two-sided platform,” he added.

The transaction was expected to close in the first quarter of 2020 and PayPal said it expected it to add to PayPal's adjusted per-share earnings by 2021.