Exclusive: Bilt’s new AI ‘Neighborhood Concierge’ takes on Amazon and other e-commerce giants

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 on 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 persuading major property owners like Related, Blackstone, Starwood, Greystar, GID, and AvalonBay to let him run rent payments on their properties through the platform—in part by letting some have an equity stake in it.

Bilt Rewards launched in 2021. A key driver in recruiting members was the launch of a co-branded credit card with Wells Fargo in 2022. Not only did it let renters earn loyalty points on rent payments through the card, but it didn’t charge a fee, which proved popular with members and expensive for the bank. Although the high-profile deal was meant to run through 2029, the partnership ended last year. Offered new plans with less lucrative terms, cardholders who’d grown used to earning generous points and a sweet deal took to Reddit to complain vociferously about Bilt.

Jain has since partnered with Cardless, launching three new tiers of cards earlier this month. But, he says, the intention was never to be a credit card company, noting that more than 80% of members pay rent through bank transfers on the app, not a credit card. They join to get loyalty points. Once there, Jain hopes they’ll stay to get rewarded for buying other stuff in their neighborhood. Along with signing up more buildings, his goal is to create a digital village green connecting into the reservation and POS systems of brands like OpenTable, Resy, Toast, Walgreens, Bed Bath & Beyond, SoulCycle, Equinox, and more. The company’s software also helps landlords manage vendor access to a building and allows members to plug into the same ecosystem when they move.

For landlords, Jain says, the payoff is lower turnover, higher satisfaction, and a 30% increase in on-time payments. For merchants, it’s more customers and repeat business. For consumers, the promise is less friction and more rewards from spending money in your neighborhood. And Bilt, of course, gets data, revenue, and a loyal customer base that it hopes to scale. “When you move, you are resetting your habits—where you shop, where you fill your prescriptions, what gym you use, what restaurants you go to,” says Jain. “We own that moment.”

It’s not unlike the philosophy that Chenault deployed in building out American Express. Unlike Visa and Mastercard, where the network is separate from the banks, Amex primarily has a closed-loop system where it issues the card, signs the merchant, and runs the network, giving it richer data and more control over the customer and merchant experience. “People would say American Express was a card company,” Chenault says. “I would say, ‘We’re not just in the payments business. We’re a service platform, and the card is a form factor to deliver services.’ I could say that 1,000 times, and people would still say, ‘Card company.’”

The same could be said of Bilt, which many still see as a loyalty program tied to a co-branded credit card. As the platform’s concierge service rolls out in beta today, Jain has chance to test—and enhance—the strength of its connected network and the appetite of members to navigate life around the home. “You stay at a hotel, you go downstairs, and somebody can help you get things done,” he says. “Now, we can create that from your home.”