Admitted to Mastercard's global Start Path programme — the moment the Mastercard relationship became formal, and the model went in front of the payments network at scale.
Programme · Start Path (Mastercard Start Path Fintech)Location · New York · Purchase, NYCohort · Autumn 2024
The programme
Start Path is the Mastercard front door.
Mastercard Start Path is Mastercard's flagship engagement programme for later-stage fintech and commerce startups. Admission means being sponsored inside the Mastercard network — with access to the product, partnership, data and go-to-market teams that would otherwise take years to reach.
Reewild (as it was then) was admitted in November 2024 on the strength of the receipt-led rewards mechanic and the verified purchase dataset. The programme accelerated the conversations that had been building through 2023 and 2024 — issuer pilots, category expansion, and the network positioning that Vela is now executing against.
Mastercard HQ · New York, Fifth Avenue
Inside the Mastercard offices · Start Path cohort day
The press moment
Rewarding behaviour, on Mastercard's Perspectives.
Mastercard Newsroom · Perspectives
Rewarding behaviour — moving more sustainable grocery picks up the food chain
Published by Mastercard Newsroom (Perspectives), 2024. The piece introduced Reewild's mechanic and the Start Path admission to Mastercard's global audience of issuers, merchants and partners.
Start Path was the point at which the Mastercard relationship shifted from occasional collaboration to formal programme sponsorship. The issuer conversations that followed (Edenred, Pluxee, and others) all trace to introductions made inside the programme — the commercial pipeline reflected in the 2026 shareholder updates has its origin here.
