Bilt, the loyalty and payments platform that now powers rental payments in 25% of U.S. apartment buildings, today launched an AI-powered concierge service that lets members seamlessly interact with the growing network of local merchants and partners that have integrated into its ecosystem. With Bilt Neighborhood Concierge, Bilt’s 5.5 million members will ultimately be able to prompt the app to pay their rent, book amenities, reserve and pay for restaurants or fitness classes, order prescription deliveries, schedule rides, book flights and cash loyalty points without leaving the platform.
Bilt founder and CEO Ankur Jain compares the service to a hotel concierge that connects the home to the neighborhood around it. “Our brand has been the home,” says Jain, who earlier this year partnered with Verifone to integrate Bilt’s technology into its payment terminals, enabling millions of merchants to recognize and reward Bilt members at the point of sale. “We won the home. Now we can turn the home into the hub for everything you do—and buy—around it.”
“Everybody talks about agents and AI, but no one can take actions for you,” says Jain. “Because we’re integrated into your building, the restaurants, the gym, the grocery store, the car service and more, we can let customers wake up and say ‘hey, can you pay my rent for me, have eggs delivered to my apartment and make a reservation for dinner?”
Bilt is competing in a battleground of commerce that few have yet to master but many want to own: the home. The behemoth in the smart home market is Amazon, which is on track to displace Walmart as the No. 1 company in the Fortune 500. Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it’s making Alexa+ available to everyone in the U.S., a revamped version of the voice-activated device that can handle multiple queries and act as an agent for users to buy from multiple vendors . Earlier versions of Alexa failed to drive much purchasing, in part because it encouraged users to buy from Amazon.
‘Neighborhood Commerce Platform’
“Housing is the gateway for commerce,” says former American Express CEO Ken Chenault, who is now chairman and managing director of venture capital firm General Catalyst and chair of Bilt’s board. He credits Jain with creating a robust infrastructure around home payments and local commerce that can now be replicated across different geographies and partners. “What Bilt has been able to do is have housing become the anchor. No one has been able to establish this anchor at scale and it’s frictionless. You go into a building and the only way you pay for rent is on the Bilt platform. You’re not having to change your behavior at all.”
What motivated Chenault to become an investor and mentor to Jain was the vision to connect local communities at scale. “If this was just a co-branded card, I would have had zero interest,” he says. “I saw that this was a neighborhood commerce platform.”
Credit Card Woes
It took a while to get there. Jain founded Bilt in 2019 as a system for renters to earn rewards on their largest monthly expense. Although he’d founded a global nonprofit community of student entrepreneurs called Kairos Society while studying economics at Wharton and sold his first company Humin to Tinder in 2016, Jain was not well known in the clubby world of real estate. He spent the first few years convincing major property owners like Related, Blackstone, Starwood, Greystar, GID and AvalonBay let him run re