How the idea of Bamboo was born.
Sending a gift card to someone in another country should not require a supplier contract, a procurement process, and a week of waiting. We built Bamboo Card because it did, and we believed it did not have to.
Bamboo Card was founded in Dubai in 2018 with a straightforward goal: give businesses a simpler, faster way to distribute digital gift cards and rewards across borders.
At the time, the market was fragmented. Brands had gift card programmes that lived in silos. Businesses wanting to send rewards to employees in multiple countries had to manage a different supplier in each one. Fintechs and loyalty platforms that wanted to offer gift cards to their users faced months of integration work just to get started. The infrastructure underneath global digital rewards was held together with manual processes and spreadsheets.
We thought there was a better way to do it: one platform, one integration, one catalogue that works everywhere. So we built it.
Bamboo Card is a B2B digital rewards infrastructure platform. In plain terms, that means we connect businesses that want to distribute gift cards and digital rewards with the brands that issue them, across 80 countries, 49 currencies, and 3,500 brands, through whichever access model fits how their business works.
A corporate buyer can log into the portal and send 500 Amazon gift cards to employees across six countries in the same time it used to take to send one. A fintech can integrate a single API and offer their users a full rewards catalogue without negotiating a single supplier contract. A neobank can embed Bamboo’s catalogue directly into their app and let their users spend their balance on brands they recognise, without building any of the fulfilment infrastructure themselves.
The platform processes over 100,000 transactions every day. More than $1 billion in digital rewards has been distributed through the Bamboo network. And the team is still driven by the same question that started it all: how do we make this even simpler?
From a single office in Dubai, Bamboo Card has grown into a global operation with a UK entity alongside our Middle East headquarters. We work with over 1,000 active clients across fintech, enterprise, loyalty, HR technology, and digital commerce. Our catalogue spans 3,500 brands and our network reaches buyers and recipients in more than 80 countries.
The Middle East is where we started, and it remains a market we know deeply. But our growth across Europe, Asia Pacific, and North America reflects something we noticed early on: the need for better digital rewards infrastructure is not regional. It is everywhere.
Reliability is everything
When a business sends a gift card to an employee on their work anniversary, or a loyalty platform fulfils a customer's points redemption, that transaction has to work. Not most of the time. Every time. That is why 95% of our orders process in under two seconds, and why our engineering team treats every failure as an urgent problem rather than an acceptable rate.
The catalogue is only as good as what's in it.
We put real effort into building relationships with brands that people actually want to receive. Google, Amazon, Apple, Steam, Uber, Airbnb: these are not incidental names in our catalogue. They are there because we know that a reward only feels like one if the recipient is genuinely excited to use it.
Flexibility matters more than most platforms admit
Different businesses access digital rewards in completely different ways. Some need a self-serve portal their HR team can use without any technical help. Others need an API their engineers integrate in a sprint. Others want to embed a full gifting experience inside their app without owning the infrastructure. We built four access models because we learned early on that forcing clients to adapt to a single model meant turning away businesses that did not fit the mould.
Partnership is not a word we use lightly
When a company integrates Bamboo Card, they are trusting us with something that touches their customers and employees. Every client has access to dedicated support with a real SLA behind it. When something goes wrong, we own the resolution.
Bamboo Card is run by a team of people who came from fintech, digital commerce, technology, and the gift card industry itself. We understand the sector we operate in not just as a business opportunity but as a practical challenge we have worked on from multiple angles.
Our headquarters is in Dubai, a city that has always attracted people who want to build things with a global perspective. It is a good place to run a company whose clients span six continents, because the instinct to operate across borders is simply part of how the team thinks.
We are a relatively small team for the volume we handle, which means the people here care deeply about the quality of what they ship and the reliability of what they maintain.
Founder & CEO
VP Operations
Marketing Director
Chief Technology Officer
Finance Manager
People & Culture Manager
Head of Sales & Partnerships
The global digital rewards market is growing fast, and the businesses distributing those rewards are becoming more sophisticated about how they do it. They want more brands, more countries, faster delivery, better reporting, and integration paths that fit how their product already works.
That is exactly what we are building toward. More catalogue depth in markets that are underserved. More tools for the businesses running complex, high-volume programmes. More ways for platforms to embed rewards without friction. And a continued focus on the reliability and compliance standards that enterprise and fintech clients genuinely need from infrastructure they depend on.
We started with a simple question in 2018. We are still answering it.
Let's talk
Whether you are here as a potential client, a brand considering listing your gift cards, or someone thinking about joining the team, we would love to talk.
Let's talk
Whether you are here as a potential client, a brand considering listing your gift cards, or someone thinking about joining the team, we would love to talk.