BREAKING  Odynn raises $9.5M seed to disrupt travel portals Reported +364% points redemptions vs legacy providers Bank travel portals live in 2-8 weeks, not 18 months Backed by Bonfire Ventures & Fiat Ventures Customers: ANZ · Bilt · Flight Centre · Curve The AI Shopify for loyalty and travel BREAKING  Odynn raises $9.5M seed to disrupt travel portals Reported +364% points redemptions vs legacy providers Bank travel portals live in 2-8 weeks, not 18 months Backed by Bonfire Ventures & Fiat Ventures Customers: ANZ · Bilt · Flight Centre · Curve The AI Shopify for loyalty and travel
Company File · Fintech · New York
Odynn logo

The company teaching banks to speak points and miles.

Odynn sells the plumbing behind embedded travel and loyalty - APIs that let a bank or fintech launch a full points-and-miles travel portal in weeks, and finally show cardholders what their rewards are actually worth.

Caption A wordmark that fits on a boarding pass. Behind it: six products, roughly fourteen people, and clients ranging from a scrappy fintech to a multi-billion-dollar bank - all quietly renting the same engine.
$9.5M
Seed raised · Feb 2026
+108%
Portal visits vs legacy
2.24x
More bookings
+364%
Points redemptions
The Pitch

A market with terrible price transparency, run by people who like it that way

Here is a fact about loyalty points that the loyalty industry would prefer you not dwell on: nobody can tell you what they are worth. A mile is worth roughly a penny, except when it is worth four cents, except when the airline quietly decides it is worth less than it was yesterday. This is not an accident. Opacity is a feature of the business. If you cannot easily compare the cash price of a hotel to its points price, you are more likely to overpay in one currency or the other, and someone downstream is happy about that.

Odynn's founding insight is that this looks a lot like a financial market with bad data - which is a thing its founder, a former Wall Street derivatives trader, knew how to recognize. The company's answer is not another consumer app begging you to optimize your Delta status by hand. It is infrastructure: a set of APIs that banks, card issuers, fintechs, and travel brands plug into so that their customers can search, book, and redeem across dozens of airline, hotel, and bank programs - with the real value of the points shown, in real time, next to the cash price. Odynn describes itself, not entirely as a joke, as "the AI Shopify for loyalty and travel." The point of the analogy is that Shopify does not sell you a sweater. It sells the store. Odynn does not want to be your travel site. It wants to be the thing your bank's travel site is secretly made of.

When you're serving customers from fintechs to multi-billion-dollar banks like ANZ, and they're all seeing these metrics, you know you've tapped into something that is an infrastructure need.
- Mark Mullen, Managing Partner, Bonfire Ventures (lead investor)
The Product Shelf

Six products, one bet: make the points legible

Odynn is modular by design. A partner can take the whole stack or one piece of it. Here is what is on the shelf.

Core Platform

Odynn Platform

AI-powered, API-first infrastructure for embedded travel, loyalty, and rewards - ticketing, booking, customer service, plus points-as-cash redemption. The engine everything else runs on.

Consumer-facing

Awayz

A live cash-and-award pricer for hotels and flights. It shows the points price and the cash price side by side, so travelers stop guessing which currency to spend.

Recommendations

Card Curator

Goal-based credit card recommendations driven by where you're spending and what you're trying to earn. This is where the company started, before it became infrastructure.

Data

Traveler DNA

Aggregates a user's airline, hotel, and bank balances, status levels, travel credits, and card benefits into a single unified profile. The memory layer behind personalization.

Analytics

Awayz Data

Comparative historical pricing across airlines and hotels, across years - the raw material for competitor analysis and travel-industry data studies.

White label

Program Manager

A next-gen, embeddable travel portal a bank or fintech drops into its own app to drive cardholder engagement, retention, and a new line of revenue.

The old way

  • Bank commissions a travel portal build
  • 18+ months of integration work
  • Heavy upfront investment
  • Points redemption bolted on, if at all
  • Customers visit once, then forget it exists

The Odynn way

  • Plug into a modular API stack
  • Live in 2-8 weeks
  • ~95% lower upfront cost, per the company
  • Cash-and-points redemption built in
  • Reported profitability in months, not years
Where It's Headed

The interface of the future is a sentence

The tidiest way to understand Odynn's ambition is the example it likes to use itself. The company imagines a traveler typing something like this and getting a real, bookable answer:

Plan me a beach trip for July 4th that optimizes my Delta status and Hilton rewards for under $1,000.
- Odynn's product vision for agentic, conversational travel

That single request touches loyalty balances, status tiers, live award pricing, cash fares, and card benefits at once - which is precisely the tangle of data Odynn spends its time untangling. The company frames its aggregation layer, Traveler DNA, as the foundation that makes this kind of one-sentence trip planning possible. Whether the agentic future arrives on schedule is anyone's guess, but the plumbing has to exist first, and that is the part Odynn is building now.

The People

A trader, a technologist, and an operator walk into a loyalty program

Founder & CEO

John Taylor Garner

A former Wall Street derivatives trader who started fixing airline miles the way he'd fix any mispriced market. Founded the consumer app Card Curator first, then pivoted it into infrastructure.

Co-Founder & CTO

Anuj Patel

Independently obsessed over the same broken travel-rewards problem while at the University of Pennsylvania. When he and Garner met, the consumer tool became a company.

Co-Founder · COO & CFO

Bruce Garner

Runs operations and finance for the lean team, which has recruited senior travel talent from Expedia, Hopper, Ascenda, and Duffel.

The Money

$9.5 million, and the metrics did the talking

In a cautious funding market, Odynn closed its seed round on a before-and-after: banks and fintechs running its stack reported real lifts in visits, bookings, and redemptions. That is a harder thing to argue with than a vision deck.

$9.5M
Seed Round · Announced February 2026
Led by Bonfire Ventures  ·  co-led by Fiat Ventures
Use of funds: go-to-market, engineering & data science hiring, deeper integrations with card networks and loyalty programs
Track Record

From a consumer app to bank-grade plumbing

2017

Company is founded as Card Curator, a consumer app for maximizing credit card rewards around personal travel goals.

Consumer era

Launches Awayz, a live cash-and-award pricer helping travelers redeem points for the best value.

The pivot

Recognizes its real value is the engine, not the app. Rebrands and consolidates under Odynn, selling B2B infrastructure to banks and fintechs.

Feb 2026

Raises a $9.5M seed round led by Bonfire Ventures and co-led by Fiat Ventures, with customers spanning fintechs to multi-billion-dollar banks like ANZ.

The Rolodex

Who's using it & who's covering it

Named customers and integration partners include:

ANZ BankBilt RewardsFlight CentreCurveLoopFasten RewardsStellarFiQuilttMonkey MilesFaredropDuffelPlusgradeWildfire

As seen in:

BloombergBarron'sWiredCNETUS NewsWharton Fintech
Marginalia

Five things worth knowing

Wall Street origin

The founder traded derivatives before deciding airline miles were a market with bad data worth fixing.

It was a consumer app

Odynn began as Card Curator. The B2C-to-B2B pivot is the whole story.

Two Penn obsessives

Garner and Patel worked the same problem separately at UPenn, then teamed up.

Small but senior

~14 people, with talent poached from Expedia, Hopper, Ascenda, and Duffel.

Engine, not destination

The "AI Shopify" line is a strategy: be the layer everyone else builds on.

Watch & Listen

Interviews & demos

The Links

Go deeper