- Chicago and New York-based Benji has raised $6.25 million in a seed round led by Preface Ventures
- Benji provides a universal API that reduces loyalty partnership integration from months to days. The platform is already connected to JetBlue’s loyalty programme
- The new funding will help Benji expand its engineering and go-to-market teams
Benji, a US-based API for loyalty partnerships, secured $6.25 million in seed funding, led by Preface Ventures and Atinc, with support from Great North Ventures, M25, and Hyde Park Venture Partners.
The Chicago-and New York-based startup, founded in 2023, helps loyalty programmes integrate with partner brands. Co-founders Nick Anastasiades, Jon Elron, and Arik Gaisler previously built and sold 2ndKitchen to REEF Technology in 2021.
“We kept hearing the same thing from loyalty teams: everybody wants partnerships, but almost nobody has enterprise-grade infrastructure to launch them quickly. The industry still runs on a huge amount of custom work behind the scenes. We built Benji to remove that friction so companies can spend less time stitching systems together and more time building programs customers actually want to use,” says Anastasiades.
According to McKinsey, cross-industry ecosystems supported by loyalty programmes could add $70-$100 trillion to global GDP. Without the right infrastructure, brands may lose partnerships, face delays, and offer less valuable points programmes because of limited redemption options.
Benji’s platform uses a single API to connect loyalty programmes across different industries. Brands can integrate once and then activate earning, redemption, transfer, and co-acquisition relationships with any programme in the network.
The current network includes JetBlue’s TrueBlue programme, CookUnity, 1-800-Flowers, and Chip City, which together serve more than 50 million active members. Benji describes itself as the Plaid of loyalty, referring to the financial platform that standardised bank account connectivity for fintech apps.
Benji’s main competitors are Loyalty Juggernaut, which provides loyalty platform software to large enterprises, and Points.com, which runs a loyalty currency exchange and partnership marketplace. Neither company offers Benji’s API-first, developer-friendly integration model.
“Loyalty is a massive market, but Fortune 2000 marketing teams have been hamstrung in their ability to co-build customers with trusted brands. Benji’s team has solved this product-first, and the pull across the biggest companies in the world, across industry, has been exceptional,” says Farooq Abbasi, general partner at Preface Ventures.
Benji currently has 12 employees, and plans to use the funds to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams, expand its network of connected loyalty programmes, and cover more use cases for earning, redemption, transfer, and co-acquisition.
