He sold pizza to bars with no kitchen. Now he's building the plumbing that lets your airline miles buy you dinner.
Most people think of loyalty programs as a drawer of plastic cards and a stack of expiring miles. Nick Anastasiades looks at the same thing and sees a wiring problem. His company, Benji, is a universal API for loyalty partnerships - the connective tissue that lets an airline, a meal-kit service, and a cookie chain agree to honor each other's points without a year of engineering misery first.
The industry has a nickname for what he is attempting: the "Plaid for loyalty." Plaid made it boring and instant to connect a bank account to an app. Benji wants the same boring, instant magic for reward points - a shared layer underneath travel, retail, food and fintech so that earning here and redeeming there becomes a default, not a custom project. Anastasiades puts the pain plainly. "We kept hearing the same thing from loyalty teams," he says. "Everybody wants partnerships, but almost nobody can build them."
In May 2026, Benji put $6.25 million behind that sentence. The seed round, led by Preface Ventures and Atinc with Great North Ventures, M25 and Hyde Park Venture Partners along for the ride, funds the unglamorous work of plugging into legacy loyalty systems that were never designed to talk to each other. The network already moving through Benji is not a list of logos for the deck - it is JetBlue, CookUnity, 1-800-Flowers and Chip City, brands that together represent more than 50 million members.
"Their partnerships often take years and are cost prohibitive for all but the largest deals. We're erasing that barrier."- Nick Anastasiades, on what Benji is built to kill
Benji is API-first, which is a polite way of saying it does its best work invisibly. The platform handles the verbs of loyalty - earn, redeem, transfer, co-acquire - across companies that would otherwise need bespoke contracts and custom code for every handshake. A member can "pay with points" at a merchant who would rather not eat a credit-card fee, or "earn points" in places that never used to count.
What used to be a year-plus of integration work, Benji claims, now takes days. That compression is the whole pitch. Loyalty has always been a game the giants could afford and everyone else admired from the sidelines. Anastasiades is trying to hand the small and mid-sized players the same toy - shared infrastructure instead of a moonshot budget.
It is a familiar shape for him. He tends to find the gap between what businesses say they want and what they can actually build, then sells the bridge.
One integration, many partners. Benji wants reward points to move between brands the way money moves between banks - quietly, instantly, by default.
JetBlue, CookUnity, 1-800-Flowers and Chip City - travel, food, flowers and cookies, all reachable through one connection.
Preface Ventures and Atinc led the seed, with Great North Ventures, M25 and Hyde Park Venture Partners. M25 has now backed Nick twice.
In 2015 Nick co-founded RedPie, the fastest pizza-delivery network in San Francisco, with Jon Elron and Arik Gaisler - the two people he would keep starting companies with. One marketing campaign sold pizzas to bars that had no kitchen of their own. It was a footnote that turned out to be the headline.
A pizza-delivery experiment in San Francisco. The accidental discovery: bars with no kitchen will happily sell someone else's food.
B2B virtual kitchens for bars, hotels, breweries and buildings. Raised $4.3M. Won a Chicago Innovation Award in 2020. "At its heart," Nick said, "2ndKitchen is a data company."
REEF Technology acquired 2ndKitchen with the whole team intact. Nick became VP of Growth, calling REEF "the perfect partner to help us rise to the next level."
Most founders are lucky to find one team that works. Nick, Jon Elron and Arik Gaisler have now built three companies together - RedPie, 2ndKitchen and Benji. The product changes from pizza logistics to virtual kitchens to loyalty APIs. The cast does not.
"REEF is the perfect partner to help us rise to the next level."- Nick on the 2ndKitchen exit, 2021
Anastasiades studied Business Administration and Psychology at UC Berkeley, then did something most people would not attempt: a dual MBA and MS in Design Innovation at Northwestern's Kellogg School at the same time. Business plus design is not a footnote on his resume - it is the operating system. He keeps building products that depend on making something complicated feel effortless.
Grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. Moved to the US in 2012.
Ran a design agency before startups - clients included Adidas and Electronic Arts.
Started a company by accident: pizza for kitchen-less bars became 2ndKitchen.
"Everybody wants partnerships, but almost nobody can build them."
"We're erasing that barrier with a platform that brings instant connectivity to legacy systems."
"At its heart, 2ndKitchen is a data company."
"REEF is the perfect partner to help us rise to the next level."
The most valuable software is often the kind you never notice. Plaid sits invisibly between your bank and your apps. Stripe hides inside a checkout button. Anastasiades is wagering that loyalty deserves the same treatment - a layer so reliable and so standard that brands stop building custom integrations and start assuming the connection is simply there.
If he is right, the next time your miles turn into a dinner, or your dinner earns you flowers, there is a decent chance Benji moved the points - and you never saw it happen. That is the goal. The best plumbing is the kind you forget exists.