LINDON — Another Utah company is making significant waves as Lindon-based Awardco recently announced a $165 million Series B funding round with a valuation over $1 billion.
Founded in 2015, Awardco is an employee recognition and rewards platform that allows companies to create recognition, incentive, milestone and behavior-driven programs.
“We all know that people leave jobs because they don’t feel seen. They don’t feel a sense of appreciation,” said Steve Sonnenberg, co‑founder and CEO of Awardco. “Awardco has created a tool that allows people to recognize every day, and then we measure that on a daily basis.”
Along with recognition for a job well done, there’s also a rewards element. Employees can be give points that carry a one-to-one dollar value and accrue over time.
“Then they can buy stuff on Awardco,” Sonnenberg said. “We created the largest configurable marketplace in the world where we take all of Amazon — hundreds of millions of products — it’s inside of Awardco. We have all the gift cards all around the world inside of Awardco. We have hotels powered by Priceline, all inside of Awardco. We have experiences powered by Viator, all inside of Awardco. Employees can pick what they want.”
This, Sonnenberg said, boosts employee engagement and increases workplace satisfaction.
Globally, the platform has over 6 million users across 163 countries. It’s used by companies like AT&T, Pacific Life, Adobe and Hertz. In fact, Utah’s own Crumbl Cookies has used Awardco for about three years now.
“We were looking for a way for our employees to help us own recognition because we understand that top down recognition can only go so far, and so we wanted to be able to empower our employees to help own recognition across the organization, have a bigger reach that way,” said Josh Olofson, Crumbl’s vice president of employee experience.
“And the second thing … a problem we were looking to solve is to find a way for us to have our employees look for and see the value of our values, of our company values in action,” he said.
In Crumbl’s instance, the company gives every employee $50 every quarter to dole out to colleagues who they feel are living up to one of the company’s four core values.
“It’s helped us make sure good work doesn’t go unnoticed. We’ve now empowered the entire workforce to own recognition,” Olofson said.
Olofson said that so far, the employees love it. It’s also helped Crumbl recognize remote employees.
“This has made it so easy, and we can recognize all of our warehouse workers out in Ohio or our warehouse in Orem, or you know, our field reps, and so it’s just been super helpful from that standpoint, to be able to recognize everyone and not just those that are in the office here,” Olofson said.
With the momentum of the $165 million funding round and $1 billion valuation, Sonnenberg said Awardco will continue to innovate in the employee recognition and rewards space, broadening its rewards and recognition platform with additional solutions for employee engagement and performance, leveraging AI to drive deeper employee insights and automations and scale its global infrastructure to power the next era of the company’s work.
“In the end, we’re going to build the best culture platform where people feel good, they feel seen, and they feel like a sense of belonging to their organization,” Sonnenberg said.
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