![]() ![]() “The average independent coffee shop is competing with Starbucks for their customers. “We’re trying to focus on independent restaurants to help them level the playing field against some of these, you know, very, very serious competitors,” said Leventhal. It became clear during our conversation that Leventhal thinks his company can appeal to the passionate – but relatively small – community that wants to leverage blockchain and Web3 today to tap into experiences in the physical world while also helping restaurants build loyalty platforms that have more headroom to grow in the future while not putting any significant technical burden on their small staffs or the customer.Īccording to Leventhal, a low technical burden is especially crucial for smaller independent operators, the type of customer that Blackbird is targeting. I think that there are potentially several layers of community and connectivity that we can power for restaurants.” “If you’re somebody who likes dessert, you have a sweet tooth, and you’re in New York in August, we curated eight restaurant desserts for you that you could, by virtue of having this pass in your Blackbird wallet, enjoy. He pointed to a campaign his early trial partners ran this summer in partnership with Coinbase called the Summer Sweet Pass as part of Coinbase’s OnChain Summer. I asked Leventhal how he thinks his company’s Web3 tech differentiates itself from what’s out there today. Still, while Leventhal and Blackbird aren’t emphasizing the platform’s Web3 underpinnings, there’s no doubt that much of the buzz around the company and the reason it was able to raise money from blue chips like Andreessen Horowitz in a challenging environment is precisely because it’s a web3 company there’s a sense among investors and early partners that the company’s technology could, in some way, upend the traditional restaurant loyalty technology market. And we need to create magic for all guests, regardless of how they think about tech, or if they think about tech at all.” ![]() ![]() ![]() “That’s crucial because the adoption of blockchain and the passion around the blockchain is rather specific and limited right now. “Blackbird works very well if you couldn’t possibly care less about the blockchain,” Leventhal told The Spoon. It’s clear from the announcement that the company is not leaning too heavily in branding itself as a Web3 company but instead emphasizing what founder Ben Leventhal sees as a friction-free, next-generation loyalty platform that helps smaller operators who may not have a significant technical staff or internal resources. The Web3 technology works in the background, creating a wallet for customers to hold their NFTs and the $FLY tokens earned over time. In short, the platform is designed to work without burdening the customer or the restaurant with technical know-how. When a customer returns and taps with the NFC reader, it acts as a digital handshake that sends info associated with a customer’s membership to the restaurant, such as first and last name, address, and dining history. From there, Blackbird issues an NFT, which acts as an identity card that keeps track of the customer’s relationship with the restaurant. When customers arrive at a restaurant, they initiate membership by tapping their smartphone on Blackbird’s NFC reader. With the news, the company lifted the curtain around its platform and how it works. This week, Blackbird, a startup building a Web3-powered restaurant loyalty platform, announced it had raised a $24 million Series A funding round led by a16z’s crypto team with participation from Amex Ventures and Bolt by QED, among others. ![]()
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