Benji, a universal API platform for loyalty partnerships, announced a $6.25 million seed funding round led by Preface Ventures and Atinc, with participation from Great North Ventures, M25, and Hyde Park Venture Partners. The company said the funding will support the expansion of its engineering and go-to-market teams in Chicago and New York as it continues scaling integrations across its loyalty partnership network.
The company’s network includes JetBlue’s loyalty program along with programs from brands such as Cook Unity, 1800-Flowers, and Chip City, representing more than 50 million active members combined.
Benji is focused on simplifying the infrastructure required for loyalty partnerships across industries, including airlines, hospitality, retail, fintech, and consumer brands. The company said traditional loyalty integrations are often expensive and time-consuming, with enterprise implementations potentially costing seven to eight figures in aggregate and taking more than a year to complete due to engineering coordination and custom development work.
Through a single API, Benji enables brands to connect loyalty programs across industries for earning, redemption, transfer, and partnership experiences without rebuilding integrations individually for each partner. The company said its platform can reduce integration timelines from months to days, helping loyalty teams launch partnerships significantly faster than traditional in-house approaches.
Benji noted that loyalty programs are increasingly becoming a core part of broader cross-industry ecosystems as brands seek to improve customer acquisition, retention, and engagement through partnerships. The company cited growing demand from travel, retail, hospitality, and fintech companies seeking more flexible loyalty experiences for consumers while accelerating partnership launches.
The company was founded by serial entrepreneurs Nick Anastasiades, Jon Elron, and Arik Gaisler. Benji marks the founders’ third company together following 2ndKitchen, which was acquired by REEF Technology in 2021. The founders said they identified similarities between operational integration challenges in food-service partnerships and the fragmented systems supporting the loyalty industry.
Benji said its platform supports earning, redemption, transfer, and co-acquisition use cases, positioning loyalty programs as a networked growth channel for brands across multiple industries.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Nick Anastasiades, Co-Founder and CEO, Benji
“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.”
Farooq Abbasi, General Partner, Preface Ventures
