Benji raises $6.25M for loyalty product; three Midwest funds invest

Benji, a Chicago and New York company building infrastructure that lets loyalty programs connect to one another, has raised $6.25 million in seed funding. Preface Ventures and Atinc led the round with three Midwest-based investors also involved in M25, Great North Ventures, and Hyde Park Venture Partners.

The company is the third built by co-founders Nick Anastasiades, Jon Elron, and Arik Gaisler. Their previous company, 2ndKitchen, was acquired by REEF Technology in 2021.

Benji's pitch is that loyalty partnerships - the deals that let, for example, an airline's miles convert into a hotel chain's points, or a credit card's rewards redeem at a retailer - are still built one custom integration at a time. The company offers a single API that handles the plumbing for earning, redeeming, and transferring points between programs. Anastasiades told reporters that the industry "still runs on a huge amount of custom work behind the scenes."

The company says a single in-house loyalty integration can cost a large enterprise seven or eight figures and take more than a year to build. That figure is Benji's own, and it doubles as the company's pricing argument.

Benji lists JetBlue, Cook Unity, 1-800-Flowers, and Chip City among the programs in its network. The company says those programs represent more than 50 million members in aggregate, though that number reflects the size of its partners' loyalty bases rather than usage of Benji itself.

The funding will go toward engineering and sales hiring across the company's Chicago and New York offices.