Benji raises $6.25M to be the "Plaid for loyalty" programmes
What's the deal? Benji, a Chicago- and New York-based startup building a universal API for loyalty partnerships, has closed a $6.25M seed round led by Preface Ventures and Atinc, with participation from Great North Ventures, M25, and Hyde Park Venture Partners.
The company's pitch: connecting loyalty programmes across industries through a single API so brands can launch partnership integrations in days rather than months. Its growing network already includes JetBlue's loyalty programme alongside brands like Cook Unity, 1800-Flowers, and Chip City — more than 50 million active members combined.
The funding will go toward expanding Benji's engineering and go-to-market teams.
Why now? Loyalty has become critical connective tissue as industries converge into cross-platform ecosystems. McKinsey estimates these ecosystems will drive between $70T and $100T of global GDP. But the infrastructure underneath most loyalty programmes is outdated — launching a single integration can cost seven to eight figures and take over a year of custom engineering.
"Everybody wants partnerships, but almost nobody has enterprise-grade infrastructure to launch them quickly," said co-founder and chief executive officer Nick Anastasiades. "The industry still runs on a huge amount of custom work behind the scenes."
Brands across travel, retail, hospitality, and fintech face growing pressure to let customers earn and redeem points more flexibly. What were once occasional marketing collaborations are becoming ongoing operational relationships between platforms.
What could go wrong? Benji is pitching itself as the "Plaid for loyalty" — a compelling analogy, but one that assumes loyalty programmes are ready to hand over integration control to a third party. Enterprise sales cycles are long, and large airlines and hotel chains may prefer to keep infrastructure in-house despite the cost. Convincing risk-averse loyalty teams to adopt shared rails won't be trivial.
The signal: The loyalty industry is following the same pattern as payments and banking before it: fragmented, custom-built infrastructure giving way to API-driven middleware. Benji's founding team — Anastasiades, Jon Elron, and Arik Gaisler — previously built 2ndKitchen, which was acquired by REEF Technology in 2021, so they've navigated the marketplace-infrastructure playbook before.
If the bet pays off, Benji could become the default plumbing layer for an industry that's only getting more complex. At $6.25M, it's still early — but the thesis that partnerships need their own infrastructure stack is hard to argue against.
Read more: markets.financialcontent.com
