The free app where 3 million Americans turn receipts, drives and transactions into cash - and where brands now buy research from people who can prove they bought the thing.
It is an ordinary Tuesday. A shopper photographs a crumpled CVS receipt on the walk to the car. A commuter's phone quietly notes a well-behaved left turn. A checking account logs a coffee. None of it feels like an event. And yet, inside a New York company called Pogo, all three just became something the shopper, the commuter and the coffee-drinker rarely get from the data economy: a little bit of money.
For twenty years the arrangement was settled and lopsided. You produced the data. Someone else sold it. Pogo's entire premise is that this was never a law of physics - just a habit nobody bothered to break. So it broke it. Share what you're comfortable with, keep what you're not, and get paid for the difference. The company calls the payments Data Dividends. The users mostly call it free money.
Figures per Pogo's June 2026 announcement and public reporting.
If we do our job right, Pogo becomes the world's most trusted source of human truth.
The shorthand came from CEO Dom Wong, and it's a good one. Honey saved you a few dollars at online checkout by hunting coupon codes. Useful - but it only touched the sliver of life that happens in a browser tab. Pogo asked the harder question: what about the other 90 percent? The receipts, the store visits, the drives, the bank transactions that make up an actual consumer.
Founded in 2020 by Dom Wong, Oskar Melking and Shikhar Mohan, Pogo built a single app to aggregate that scattered exhaust in one place, hand the controls to the person who generated it, and let them switch each use case on or off. Anonymous market research? Sure. Personalized offers from a brand you trust? If you like. Nothing you didn't agree to. That last part is the whole company.
Photograph paper and digital receipts to earn points - and to prove a purchase actually happened. A single receipt is worth about a penny; the magic is in millions of people doing it weekly.
Securely connect accounts so Pogo can surface savings, fee refunds and personalized offers - and pay you when your anonymized spending powers market research.
Opt in to share location and driving behavior. A better driving score unlocks discounted auto-insurance rates. Your car, quietly negotiating on your behalf.
Short, low-friction surveys and play add up. Roughly 1,000 points equals $1; cash out to PayPal or Venmo, or take gift cards, once you cross the threshold.
Every category is opt-in and reversible. Share what you want, keep what you don't, change your mind anytime. Consent isn't a checkbox here - it's the product.
Real money for the value your data creates. New users get a small sign-up bonus; cash-out starts once you've banked enough points. Small sums, at population scale.
Conceptual illustration of Pogo's pitch, not audited economics.
Here is the twist that turns a rewards app into a business investors chase. Five years of opted-in receipts and transactions gave Pogo something the rest of the AI research world is suddenly desperate for: proof. In an internet drowning in synthetic answers and fake respondents, Pogo can do a boring, unbeatable thing - confirm that the person answering actually bought the product.
In June 2026 the company launched what it calls the world's first AI research platform powered by purchase-verified buyers. Brands run AI-moderated interviews and surveys against a panel of real, verified shoppers. "With Pogo's receipt verification," said Shannon Clayton of private-label maker OFI, "we felt so much more confident in the data." The rewards app, it turned out, was the research platform all along. It just took five years of receipts to see it.
Launched the purchase-verified AI research platform and announced $32M raised to date. Backers include Buckley Ventures, Mantis (The Chainsmokers), 20VC, Village Global, Lenny Rachitsky and the founders of Honey.
A $12.3M seed led by Josh Buckley, plus a previously unannounced $2.5M pre-seed - fuel to build "Honey for the real world."
Dom Wong, Oskar Melking and Shikhar Mohan set out to pay people for their own data.
We can almost create Honey for the real world.
Its backers include The Chainsmokers, MrBeast's Night Ventures, Sophia Amoruso and OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder - alongside the founders of Honey.
Newsweek named Pogo the #1 loyalty app two years in a row - unusual for a company that's really about data rights.
A single scanned receipt is worth roughly a penny. The business is the sum of millions of pennies, scanned weekly.
Pogo claims visibility into about 1 in every 150 shopping trips in America - a window worth $470B+ in annual spend.
Links open YouTube search results so you always land on the latest available clips.
Return to that ordinary Tuesday. The shopper still crumples the CVS receipt. The commuter still makes the turn. The coffee still costs what it costs. Nothing about the day looks different from the outside - which is exactly the point. Pogo didn't ask anyone to change their life. It changed the terms underneath it.
The data was always being collected. The only question was whether the person generating it would ever see a cent of the value. For 3 million Americans, the answer is now yes - and for the brands buying research from people who can prove they were really there, the answer is a kind of honesty the internet had nearly forgotten. Small checks, real proof. It turns out that was worth building a company around.