New Loyalty Startup Snags Dollars and Big Name Partnerships

Small-merchant loyalty program startup Thanx launched on Tuesday (Nov. 4) with $4.7 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and partnerships with Visa, MasterCard and Apple Pay — making it the only rewards provider that works with Apple’s mobile payment system, according to TechCrunch.

To streamline the process for customers, Thanx eliminates sign-up forms and loyalty cards. Customers are identified by their credit cards (though Thanx never sees the card numbers, which is why the Visa, MasterCard and Apple integration is key), and rewards are cash that’s pushed directly back to the credit card account without any action require on the customer’s part.

Thanx’s system also sends push notifications alerting customers to discounts and merchant rewards. While it doesn’t capture payment card numbers, Thanx does track consumer information to let merchants pinpoint their most loyal customers, as well as customers they might be on the edge of losing, and push rewards or discounts to customers accordingly.

And because Thanx is independent of the point-of-sale system, it can work with Square or other POS devices marketed to smaller retailers.

The $4.7 million in Series A investment from Sequoia comes on top of $1.3 million in seed funding from SoftTech VC, for a total of $6 million. Thanx founder Zach Goldstein said the company will use the new cash to create more products in the marketing campaign suite and to build out the engineering and sales departments for his San Francisco-based team.