Blackbird, Square Peg team up on first seed deal since Canva, backing digital business card start-up Blinq

“It’s fundamentally solving a problem that hasn’t been solved yet on the internet – identity fragmentation,” he tells The Australian Financial Review.

“People go to an event, meet someone, and they can swipe and scan their QR code, and it comes up in their contact details. Then, if I update my information, it will update the contact’s in real-time.”

Expanding hobby

When Mr Webb launched Blinq in late 2017 as a hobby, Apple had added QR code scanning capability to iOS. Android did not roll out this technology until late 2019, not long before the pandemic hit.

This limited the company’s early adoption because the experience of experience sharing details with anyone who didn’t have an iPhone.

But, since then, its usage has skyrocketed.

Mr Webb said the company had adopted a freemium model, in which users could access a basic version for free, but had to pay for additional features such as extra cards.

It is also signing up enterprise customers to a paid version of the product, which gives businesses a way to easily manage and update their professional identity from a dashboard. For example, if a company moves offices, it can use the dashboard to automatically update the addresses of all employees in their Blinq profiles and email signatures.

Growth areas

Ninety per cent of Blinq’s business stems from the US. New usage often coincides with major conferences in the US, such as South by Southwest in March.

It is already being used by teams at Google, Tesla, Uber and Airwallex, according to the Blinq website.

“We really want to build out the business product and add more enterprise features,” Mr Webb said.

“And we want to do email signatures and the virtual backgrounds better. When we nail the first impression, then we can focus on the follow-up – how to engage someone after you’ve met them, and prompt you to reach out to them again.”

Blackbird Ventures co-founder and partner Rick Baker said like Canva, Blinq had a “cool viral loop” where people start using it themselves, word of mouth spreads and it takes off inside a company.

“In the same way that Canva crosses the consumer and B2B world, Blinq spans both as well,” he said.

“It has an organic, bottom-up sales model where people find it, start using it at home and in their work life and then pull it into the organisation.

“Blinq is exactly the type of business we’re looking for, and we love at Blackbird.”

Square Peg principal James Tynan said this was the first major innovation to contact information storage since before the iPhone.

“It’s time for a connected identity layer that never goes out of date,” he said.