Powa Technologies

The problem

By 2007 most retailers still treated the mobile phone as a marketing channel rather than a shop. Powa's founding idea was that any piece of media, a poster, a magazine page, a television advertisement or a product on a shelf, should be a place where a purchase could be completed immediately from a phone. The industry now pursues that idea under the names contextual and agentic commerce.

The approach

Powa built three products. PowaWeb was a hosted e-commerce platform for smaller merchants. PowaPOS was a tablet-based point-of-sale system for shops. PowaTag, the flagship, was an app that let a consumer buy by scanning a code or by letting the phone hear an audio watermark in an advertisement. The company sold to retailers and brands directly and through partnerships with payment networks, and expanded quickly from London into the United States, Europe and Asia.

For its first six years Powa was funded largely by Dan himself. In August 2013 it raised $76 million from Wellington Management, the Boston fund manager, reported at the time as the largest Series A round for a technology company, and a further $80 million from the same investor in November 2014. In June 2014 it bought the Hong Kong mobile-payments company MPayMe for $75 million in shares. In August 2015 it announced an agreement with China UnionPay to take PowaTag into Chinese retail.

Roles

Dan founded Powa and led it as chief executive throughout. Bright Station's contribution was his capital and his time; Powa was an independent company with its own board and institutional investors, not a subsidiary of Bright Station Limited.

Outcome

In early 2016 a funding round under negotiation did not close in time. The company's lender called in its loans and Deloitte was appointed administrator of Powa Technologies Group plc on 19 February 2016, and of the main operating company on 22 February. Several hundred people lost their jobs. The businesses were sold separately: PowaTag to a consortium of investors, PowaWeb to its management, and PowaPOS to the Israeli company SuperCom.

The administration was widely reported, and Dan has given his own account of it publicly, including his view that the company was close to completing the UnionPay deployment and that the circumstances of the administration were not of its own making. Others involved have disputed that account, and a related dispute was settled in 2017. That reporting is collected, with its dates, on the press archive at danwagner.co.uk.

Within weeks of the administration Dan founded Rezolve to continue the same mission, with some of Powa's investors and new backers. The idea that any media could be a point of purchase runs directly from PowaTag to the company now listed on Nasdaq.

Today

Powa Technologies Ltd and Powa Technologies Group plc were dissolved in September 2023. No Powa business operates under that name. Status checked 24 September 2026.