A founder who built his own product with an inscription to help restaurants make better connections with potential diners raised $50 million for his latest startup: The new perspective is the idea of customer loyalty.
Blackbird Laboratory A payment with the Loitati-Racing Park platform was established for the restaurant to develop duplicate businesses while reducing some friction around the transaction. Now, with the signing of about 1,000 restaurants, CEO Ben Leventhal said Blackbird plans to use the money to launch its latest product, a cross-noble “point” service called the Blackbird Club and expand to more markets outside of New York (its Homebase), San Francisco and Sanfancisco and Charleston, South Carolina, South Carolina.
(Charleston, do you ask? “Charleston punches above the class,” Levintal said in an interview. “It’s a great restaurant city.” In Blackbird’s New Zealand, it’s also Meta’s Blackbird, which Levintal calls “our good test market.”)
New supporter Spark Capital is leading the latest round, also from Coinbase Ventures, Amex Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, three investors backing Blackbird. 2023 USD 24 million Series A. Valuation is not disclosed, but for reference Tone Notes In the final round, the startup is worth about $124 million. The startup has raised $85 million to date.
Coinbase and Amex are the strategies names in this list.
Amex acquired Resy, a booking platform previously founded by Leventhal. Leventhal said the two companies (Resy and Blackbird) are not integrated now, but “can say we will,” Leventhal said. Also received the food blog Eater, founded by Leventhal, a third restaurant startup: Now it is Part of Vox. There is no plan on how and whether to cooperate.
Meanwhile, Blackbird describes its FlyNet payment service as building a three-layer transaction protocol for Coinbase according to. Diners can pay for it on the dining table through the Blackbird’s app and redeem loyalty points when visiting restaurants.
It is worth mentioning that blockchain is strictly a necessary part of the mix, as there are many other loyalty programs in the market built on more conventional financial structures.
“I don’t think it must have to be built on blockchain,” he said. “Visa’s network is more or less created using the same principles we use for FlyNet, and obviously they don’t have blockchains.” But he also noted, “We do think that over time we do think that it will be important opportunities that will be based on chains,” he said, which includes how Blackbirds and restaurants hold customer profiles and activities. “Consumers will be able to continue to have that profile,” he said, which also relates to how Blackbird’s vision of interacting with restaurants: each restaurant customer will eventually become a shareholder in Blackbird.
You might think there are two startups dedicated to restaurant deals, and Leventhal may already have the business in hand. It turns out that he still desires more.
Owning a restaurant has long been a challenging business, but over the past few years, the economy and changing consumer habits have particularly shocked the restaurant world. The figures cited by Leventhal points out that today’s restaurants have an average profitability of less than 5%, while the average profitability of early restaurants is about 20%. While platforms like Instagram and Tiktok have turned the world into armchair foodies, producing a large number of people who flock to the latest and coolest cafes, they are doing so with rapidly declining profit margins and increasing price sensitivity.
“There is a disconnect between the popularity of the restaurant industry and the consumer’s love for restaurants and ultimately profitability,” he said.
Of course, disconnecting in startup thinking means opportunity.
“The restaurant industry is composed of millions of local small business owners around the world. These restaurants are at the mercy of technology platforms that can charge a large and often growing restaurant for their profits,” Arianna Simpson, general partner of A16Z Crypto, told TechCrunch on A16Z Crypto. She believes that this is the particularity that blockchain can play: improving profit structure. “Ben’s vision is to target the network owned by restaurants and diners themselves, which is only enabled by blockchain.” Today, Blackbird has saved 3-4% of restaurant customers on payment processing fees.
