Investing in point.me to transform travel with rewards points

In the fiercely competitive landscape of consumer credit cards, earning and retaining customer loyalty has become more crucial than ever. As of Q2 2024, there were approximately 599 million open credit card accounts in the U.S., with over 80% of adults owning at least one credit card and the average American holding nearly 4 cards.

To remain “top of wallet” amid all this competition, credit card companies will often turn to loyalty programs, in which cardholders can accumulate points and/or airline miles by making purchases with their card, which they can then spend on travel, consumer goods and more. This has proven to be an effective way to attract customers: NerdWallet reports that 41% of Americans have a travel rewards credit card, including 52% of American millennials. At the same time, a Forbes article indicates that up to 85% of loyalty points go unredeemed in the US, totaling approximately $100 billion.

A top reason cardholders cite for not redeeming their points is that redemptions can be time-consuming, manual and complex, particularly for people who belong to multiple loyalty programs. This has led to the emergence of “points concierges” who help consumers optimize their points and miles redemptions as a bespoke service.

A market this large with so much friction is ripe for disruption, and point.me is leading that charge.

point.me is an award travel search and booking engine that makes it easy to redeem flights and maximize the value of consumers’ points. Its powerful search engine connects to 30+ reward programs across 150+ airlines and offers step-by-step guidance on how to search for flights, transfer points and book travel with points and miles.

The secret to point.me’s success lies in its search engine; its proprietary database of loyalty program partnerships, points transfer ratios, redemption options and promotional deals; and its direct data access to major airlines’ bookable seating inventory systems. This combination enables the platform to provide comprehensive and highly accurate search results in near-real-time, helping its users get often many times more value out of their points than they otherwise would have gotten — a significant competitive advantage over other travel reward sites that simply scrape web data.

A subscription-based service, point.me offers a standard “self-serve” option, a premium subscription with additional perks, a trip-planning concierge service and a points strategy consultation to help customers optimize their credit card usage for their points-based travel goals. It also white-labels its search engine for clients such as AmEx and BILT and has other enterprise offerings. Over time, point.me plans to widen its product appeal to democratize points use for the benefit of card issuers and consumers alike.

Delivering on such an ambitious vision and disruptive technology platform requires an expert team, and point.me has the experience and pedigree to see it through. Founder and CEO Adam Morvitz previously founded the points consultancy firm Juicy Miles, while co-founder and President Tiffany Funk spent 12 years as Executive Director of One Mile at a Time, one of the world’s largest independently owned travel and loyalty blogs. As the former CTO of exited Citi Ventures portfolio company Freebird, Head of Product and Engineering Dan Kaufman has an impressive travel tech background as well.

For all these reasons and more, we are delighted to co-lead point.me’s Series B funding round with Nyca Partners and to support the company’s journey. We are joined in our investment by Brian Kelly (founder of The Points Guy), Samsung Next, RiverPark Ventures, FourCities Capital, MoreThan Capital, as well as prior investors Thayer Ventures and PAR Capital.

Our congratulations to Adam, Tiffany, Dan and the whole point.me team — we can’t wait to partner with you for years to come.