A founder who has carved out a name for himself to help restaurants better connect with potential guests has collected $ 50 million for his latest startup: a new interpretation of the idea of customer loyalty.
Blackbird Labs has built a payment platform for payment-menet -oyalty-meet-blockchain for restaurants to develop repeated business while reducing part of the transactions friction. Now, with some 1,000 restaurants registered, CEO Ben Leventhal said that Blackbird planned to use money to launch his new product, a transversal “points” service that he calls Blackbird Club, as well as to develop on more markets outside New York (his head office), San Francisco and Charleston, South Caroline.
Why Charleston, do you ask? “Charleston hits over his class,” said Leventhal in an interview with Techcrunch. “It is a big city of restoration for its size.” He also seems to be the equivalent of New Zealand Blackbird for Meta, Leventhal calling him “a cheap test for us”.
Spark Capital, a new donor, directs the latter round, with the also participation of Coinbase Ventures, Amex Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz – three investors who supported Blackbird in his series of 24 million dollars in 2023. The evaluation is not disclosed, but for a reference point, Pitchbook notes that starting was estimated at around $ 124 million in the last round. The startup has raised $ 85 million to date.
Coinbase and Amex are strategic names in this list.
AMEX has acquired Resy, a reserve platform that Leventhal previously founded, in 2019. The two companies – Resy and Blackbird – are not integrated now, but “it is fair to say that we will do it,” said Leventhal. Before Resy, the third startup focused on the founded Leventhal restaurant, The Food Blog Eater, was also acquired: it is now part of Vox. No plan on how it will lead to a partnership agreement.
Blackbird describes its Flynet payment service as a layer-three transaction protocol built on the Coinbase base. The guests can use it to pay meals at the table via the Blackbird application, as well as to exchange loyalty points when they visit restaurants.
It is worth asking if the blockchain was strictly a necessary part of the mixture. There are many other loyalty and payment programs on the market, including a number that are direct competitors in Blackbird, such as Punchh, Toast and Lightspeed, built on more conventional financial structures.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily” must be built on the blockchain “, said Leventhal. “The visa network, more or less, was created using the same principles that we use for Flynet, and obviously they did not have a blockchain.”
But Leventhal also stressed that “there are a few things that we believe that over time, these will be important opportunities, and these opportunities will be based on the channel.” These include how Blackbird and restaurants have customer profiles and activities, he said. “Consumers will be able to continue to have this profile,” Leventhal at Techcrunch told. It also relates to the way Blackbird plans for his commitment with restaurants, he said: each restaurant client will ultimately be a Blackbird shareholder.
You might think that with two startups dedicated to the consumers of the restaurants of restaurants, Leventhal could have been filled with the company. In fact, he is always hungry more.
Having restaurants has long been a difficult business, but the economy and the evolution of consumer habits have particularly reversed the world of restaurants in recent years.
Leventhal cites figures from the National Restaurant Association which note that the average profitability of restaurants today is less than 5%, against an average of around 20% in the early 2000s.
While platforms like Instagram and Tiktok have transformed the world into gourmets into a chair, producing legions of people who spare virally to the most recent and coolest coffee, they do this in the middle of a period of margins quickly decreasing and increased sensitivity to prices. These are areas that will only become difficult than if the United States really locks up on its latest price increases.
“There is a disconnection in the catering industry between the popularity and the intensity of consumers’ love for restaurants and, ultimately, the profitability of the industry,” he said.
This disconnection, of course, in the thought of startups means opportunities.
“The catering industry is made up of millions of local owners from small businesses from around the world,” said Arianna Simpson, general partner of A16Z, in Techcrunch by e-mail. “These restaurants are at the mercy of technological platforms which can charge a significant percentage and often growing the margin of a restaurant.”
Simpson thinks that this is specifically there that blockchain can play a role: to improve this margin structure. “Ben’s vision is for a network that belongs to restaurants and guests themselves, which only blockchains allow,” she said, adding that Blackbird already saves her catering customers 3 to 4% in payment processing costs.
