{"id":661452,"date":"2025-04-08T15:24:53","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T12:24:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/blackbird-gobbles-up-50m-for-its-blockchain-based-payment-loyalty-app-for-restaurants\/"},"modified":"2025-04-08T15:24:53","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T12:24:53","slug":"blackbird-gobbles-up-50m-for-its-blockchain-based-payment-loyalty-app-for-restaurants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/blackbird-gobbles-up-50m-for-its-blockchain-based-payment-loyalty-app-for-restaurants\/","title":{"rendered":"Blackbird gobbles up $50M for its blockchain-based payment-loyalty app for restaurants"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A founder who has carved out a name for himself building products to help restaurants connect better with would-be diners has raised $50 million for his latest startup: a new take on the idea of customer loyalty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Blackbird Labs<\/a> has built a payments-meets-loyalty-meets-blockchain platform for restaurants to grow repeat business while reducing some of the friction around transactions. Now, with with some 1,000 restaurants signed up, CEO Ben Leventhal said Blackbird plans to use the money to launch its newest product, a cross-restaurant \u201cpoints\u201d service it\u2019s calling Blackbird Club, as well as to expand into more markets outside of New York (its Homebase), San Francisco and Charleston, South Carolina.\u00a0<\/p>\n

(Charleston, you ask? \u201cCharleston punches above its class,\u201d Leventhal said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s a great restaurant city for its size.\u201d It also app<\/a>ears to the be Blackbird\u2019s equivalent of New Zealand for Meta, with Leventhal calling it \u201ca good test market for us.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Spark Capital, a new backer, is leading this latest round, with participation also from Coinbase Ventures, Amex Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, three investors that backed Blackbird in its $24 million Series<\/a> A in 2023. Valuation is not being disclosed but for a point of reference, PitchBook notes<\/a> that the startup was valued at around $124 million in that last round. The startup has raised $85 million to-date.<\/p>\n

Coinbase and Amex are strategic names in that list.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amex acquired Resy, a reservations platform that Leventhal previously founded, in 2019. The two companies \u2014 Resy and Blackbird \u2014 are not integrating now but \u201cIt\u2019s fair to say we will,\u201d Leventhal said. Previous to Resy, the third restaurant-focused startup Leventhal founded, the food blog Eater, was also acquired: it\u2019s now part of Vox. No plans on how and if to partner there.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Blackbird describes its Flynet payment service as an layer-three transaction protocol built on Coinbase\u2019s BASE<\/a>. Diners can use it to pay for meals at the table via Blackbird\u2019s app, as well as to redeem loyalty points when they visit restaurants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth asking whether blockchain was strictly a necessary part of the mix? There are plenty of other loyalty and payment programs in the market \u2014 include a number that are direct competitors to Blackbird like Punchh, Toast, Lightspeed, etc. \u2014 that are built on more conventional financial structures.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it necessarily \u2018has to be built on blockchain,\u2019\u201d Leventhal said. \u201cVisa\u2019s network, more or less, was created using the same principles that we\u2019re using for Flynet, and obviously they didn\u2019t have blockchain.\u201d <\/p>\n

But he pointed out too that \u201cthere are a few things that we do believe that over time will be important opportunities, and those opportunities will be based on being on-chain.\u201d These include how Blackbird and restaurants hold customer profiles and activity, he said. \u201cConsumers will be able to continue to own that profile.\u201d It also relates to how Blackbird envisions its engagement with restaurants, he said: each restaurant customer ultimately will be a shareholder of Blackbird.<\/p>\n

You might think that with two startups dedicated to the consumer-facing side of the restaurant trade that Leventhal might have had his fill of the business. As it turns out, he\u2019s still hungry for more.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Owning restaurants has long been a challenging enterprise, but the economy and changing consumer habits have especially knocked the world of restaurants around a lot in the last few years. <\/p>\n

Leventhal cites figures from the National Restaurant Association that note that the average profitability of restaurants these days is under 5%<\/a>, compared to an average of around 20% in the early Noughties. <\/p>\n

While platforms like Instagram and TikTok have turned the world into armchair foodies, producing legions of people who virally flock to the latest and coolest cafe, they are doing this amid a time of rapidly declining margins and heightened price sensitivity. These are areas that are only going to get tougher if the U.S. really locks down on its latest tariff hikes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a disconnect in the restaurant industry between the popularity and the intensity of consumer love for restaurants and ultimately the profitability of the industry,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That disconnect, of course, in startup thinking means opportunity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe restaurant industry is made up of millions of local, small business owners around the world. Those restaurants are at the mercy of tech platforms that can charge a large, and often growing, percentage of a restaurant\u2019s margin,\u201d Arianna Simpson General<\/a> Partner at a16z crypto, told TechCrunch over email. <\/p>\n

She believes this is specifically where blockchain can play a role: improving that margin structure. \u201cBen\u2019s vision is for a network that is owned by the restaurants and the diners themselves, which is something that only blockchains enable.\u201d Today, Blackbird is already saving its restaurant customers 3-4% in payment processing fees, she added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A founder who has carved out a name for himself building products to help restaurants connect better with would-be diners has raised $50 million for his latest startup: a new take on the idea of customer loyalty.\u00a0 Blackbird Labs has built a payments-meets-loyalty-meets-blockchain platform for restaurants to grow repeat business while reducing some of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":661453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Ben01.jpg?resize=1200,798","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[74894,75736,74889,155432,155433,74839,22512,70917],"class_list":["post-661452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-blockchain","tag-crypto","tag-payments","tag-ben-leventhal","tag-blackbird-labs","tag-fundraising","tag-restaurants","tag-startups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}