---
title: "PayPal → Honey"
url: "https://mahouse.world/ma-deals/paypal-buy-honey-2019"
type: "M&A deal"
year: "2019"
author: "Ihor Vlasov"
reviewed: "2026-09-20"
---

# PayPal → Honey

PayPal's largest acquisition at the time: about $4bn in cash and assumed equity awards for a browser extension that found discount codes at checkout, bought to move PayPal from the moment of payment to the moment of deciding what to buy.

PayPal's largest acquisition at the time, about $3.6bn cash plus $400m in assumed equity awards, to move earlier into the shopping journey.

- **Acquirer:** PayPal (United States)
- **Target:** Honey (United States)
- **Value:** $4B
- **Announced:** November 2019
- **Completed:** January 2020
- **Sector:** Fintech
- **Deal type:** acquisition

## Why it mattered

Honey had 17 million monthly users who let it watch their shopping and apply coupons; PayPal had 300 million accounts that appeared only at checkout. The thesis was that a payments company that saw the whole shopping journey — search, price comparison, rewards — could steer purchases to merchants that paid it and defend against the platforms, Apple and Google, that were embedding payments into the browser and the phone. At roughly 40 times Honey's revenue it was priced as a strategic platform, not as a coupon business.

The deal was announced two months after PayPal's investor day promised a "super app" and became the anchor of it: Honey's rewards and shopping tools were folded into the PayPal app and extension over the following two years.

## What it left behind

The super app did not arrive, PayPal's growth slowed, and Honey's model came under a different kind of scrutiny in 2024–25 when creators alleged the extension replaced their affiliate codes with its own at checkout — a claim that went to litigation and prompted a reckoning with the affiliate industry's rules. For acquirers the case is a reminder that a consumer product bought for its distribution brings its practices with it, and that the moment before the payment is harder to own than the payment.

— Ihor Vlasov, M&A FinTech Expert. Last reviewed 2026-09-20. https://mahouse.world/authors/ihor-vlasov