The world’s largest pizza company has spent 65 years turning a simple dinner into a system - one built from franchisees, dough factories, delivery routes and a checkout screen that remembers what you crave.
The Golden Arches sell burgers, but the durable product is a system - franchise economics, high-traffic real estate, supply-chain discipline and a loyalty app now used by nearly 210 million active customers.
Hertz made its name handing travelers a set of keys. Its next act is about everything around the car - buying it well, keeping it moving, selling it smartly and, increasingly, running fleets for machines and people alike.
IHG looks like a hotel company from the lobby. Behind the desk, it is a fee-driven platform connecting 21 brands, thousands of property owners and more than 160 million loyalty members - with very little real estate on its own balance sheet.

From a teenage farmers-market job to the executive committee at IHG, Heather Balsley built a career by learning how small customer moments connect to a global commercial system.

Sara Griffin is a retail marketing executive who serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Belk, the Charlotte-based Southern department store chain. She built her career over a decade at Saks OFF 5TH, where she rose from marketing leadership to Chief Marketing and Analytics Officer, launched the SaksOFF5TH.com site in 2013, helped build the retailer's Canadian store fleet, and created the tender-neutral OFF 5TH Rewards loyalty program that surpassed 2.5 million enrollments. A Yale graduate with a Wharton MBA and a former Monitor Deloitte consultant, she later served as CMO of The Shade Store before joining Belk. She is known for tying data, analytics and marketing together to deliver personalized shopping experiences.
Tammy Redpath is the Chief Marketing Officer of EVEREVE, the Edina, Minnesota-based women's fashion retailer, a role she stepped into in April 2026. She brings more than three decades of retail and brand leadership, most of it at Target Corp., where she rose from store management to senior vice president of marketing and served as president of Target's India operations. Before EVEREVE she was CEO of Inside Edge Commercial Interior Services, chief engagement officer at Lakeshore Learning Materials, and an independent leadership and brand consultant. At EVEREVE she leads global marketing strategy, brand positioning, and customer engagement across the retailer's stores and digital channels.
Resal is a Saudi digital gifting, rewards, and loyalty platform based in Jeddah. Founded in 2016, it connects merchants, businesses, and individuals through a single ecosystem that issues and manages digital gift cards, prepaid cards, loyalty points, and vouchers. Originally launched as a flower-and-gift delivery app, Resal pivoted in 2021 into a full B2B rewards and loyalty infrastructure company, and now serves more than 1.5 million users and over 1,000 organizations, working with 400+ retailers such as Jarir, Amazon, Noon, and Landmark Group across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
AppCard is a New York-based loyalty marketing and shopper analytics platform built for independent grocers and multi-location retailers. It captures SKU-level purchase data at the point of sale, then uses machine learning to deliver personalized offers, digital coupons and automated campaigns that help brick-and-mortar stores retain customers and grow sales. Founded in 2011 by ICQ co-founder Yair Goldfinger, the company serves thousands of independent grocers reaching tens of millions of shoppers, and has expanded into co-branded payment cards.
Colavo Ground is a Seoul-founded software company behind ColavoSalon, a free mobile-first CRM and booking platform for independent beauty professionals and salons. It bundles online booking, an appointment calendar, automated multi-channel reminders, loyalty and package tools, staff commissions and sales analytics into one app, aiming to cut no-shows and improve client retention. Colavo says it is used by well over 100,000 beauty pros across dozens of countries, and has raised roughly $3.77M, with a Series A round in 2021.
Hang is a New York-based software company building an AI-powered marketing and loyalty platform for consumer brands. Marketed as 'the autonomous marketing system,' Hang replaces static points programs with personalized, gamified rewards - branded minigames, dynamic quests and 1:1 offers - alongside self-cleaning customer data, smart segments and AI-driven campaigns. It launched in 2022 as an NFT-powered membership platform backed by a $16M Series A from Paradigm, then repositioned around AI and now serves restaurant, beauty, apparel and e-commerce brands such as Just Salad, Jeni's, Boba Guys and Hattie B's.
Rinsed is a New York-based vertical SaaS company that builds a customer relationship management (CRM) platform purpose-built for the car wash industry. It plugs into a wash's existing point-of-sale hardware and helps operators grow and retain unlimited-wash membership subscriptions through automated email and text marketing, online sign-ups, churn-reduction tools, salesperson coaching, and business analytics. Founded in 2019 and backed by Founders Fund, Bedrock Capital, VMG Technology and Y Combinator, Rinsed serves more than 3,000 car washes across the U.S. and Canada.
Lava.ai is a San Francisco software company that runs a Realtime AI customer-engagement platform for sports teams, live-event venues, retailers and large enterprises. Its engine ties together ticketing, point-of-sale, mobile wallets, apps, parking and live game feeds through 250+ integrations, then uses AI to deliver personalized offers, membership perks, stored-value rewards and clienteling 'in the moment.' Co-founded by TIBCO founder Vivek Ranadive and former TIBCO executive Wen Miao, Lava counts more than 50 franchises and brands - including the NBA, Real Madrid, the LA Rams and the Cleveland Browns - among its users.
Blizzfull is a Glendale, California restaurant technology company that bundles online ordering, POS, self-service kiosks, kitchen screens, branded websites and apps, marketing, and loyalty into one AI-powered platform. Founded in 2012 by web developers Adam Dougherty and Zach Zurn, it charges restaurants a flat monthly fee and takes 0% commission on direct orders, positioning itself against third-party delivery apps that take up to 30%. Blizzfull's pitch is that independent restaurants should own their customers, their data, and their revenue, and it says it powers more than 1,000 restaurants nationwide.
Grant Sohn is the co-founder and co-CEO of Spoqa, the Seoul-based company behind Dodo Point, Korea's #1 offline rewards service, which grew past 20 million users and 10,000+ merchant partners. A Stanford economics graduate and former McKinsey analyst, he left consulting in the United States to build loyalty software for brick-and-mortar shops in South Korea. In 2018 he co-founded Carry Protocol, a blockchain venture aiming to give shoppers control of their own transaction data, and after selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, he refocused Spoqa on restaurants with Kitchenboard.
YEBO is a Los Angeles Web3 company building no-code tools that let brands and creators design 3D virtual stores and launch interoperable NFT rewards and loyalty programs. Its stated mission is to bring people into Web3 by letting them create their own digital assets - buildings, stores, products - that can move freely from one Web3 environment to another. Founded in 2013 and later repositioned around blockchain rewards, YEBO is led by serial entrepreneur and Bitvore co-founder David Mandel.
Brad Olson runs Sollis Health, the members-only concierge urgent and emergency care company that treats your time as the real luxury. He came to medicine sideways - from Bain consulting to Starwood's loyalty empire to Peloton's first 100 employees - and now applies the playbook of emotional loyalty and hospitality to a 15,000-member, 11-clinic operation where the average wait to see an ER-boarded doctor is zero to fifteen minutes. His pitch is blunt: if any consumer business ran like a hospital ER, it would be out of business the next day.
John Paul is a Paris-based premium concierge and customer-loyalty company that operates white-label services for luxury brands and enterprises. Founded in 2007-2008 by David Amsellem, it pairs human concierges with a proprietary CRM platform to manage the relationships brands have with their most valuable clients and employees. After merging with US rival LesConcierges in 2015, it was acquired by AccorHotels in 2016 and now runs as a business accelerator inside the Accor group, serving clients such as Visa, Hyundai, Orange and luxury houses across automotive, finance, fashion and travel.
Terrence Morash is VP, Head of Marketing (Brand and Creative) at Slice, the New York-based technology platform powering independent pizzerias across the United States. A veteran creative and marketing leader with deep roots in digital advertising, he has shaped Slice's transformation from a consumer pizza-ordering app into a full-service B2B partner for local pizza shops - building brand campaigns, a loyalty program, a POS system launch, and the 'Slice of the Union' thought leadership series. Before Slice, Morash led creative at Shutterstock, where his trend-forecasting work reached global audiences, and held senior creative roles at Rosetta, Again Interactive, and Zeta Interactive.

Wen Miao is the co-founder and CEO of Lava.ai, a San Francisco-based company building real-time AI-powered customer engagement and loyalty platforms for sports teams, entertainment venues, and enterprise brands. Before Lava.ai, he was SVP and GM at TIBCO Software, where he led global client services and launched real-time predictive customer engagement platforms. Lava.ai counts Real Madrid, the LA Rams, the Sacramento Kings, and the Cleveland Browns among its clients, and has raised over $33.7M in funding. In 2015, Computerworld named Miao a Premier 100 IT Leader.
Kun Gao is a serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and original CEO of Crunchyroll, the platform that turned anime from a niche US curiosity into a billion-dollar streaming giant (acquired by Sony/AT&T WarnerMedia for $1.2 billion). Now he's doing it again as Co-Founder and CEO of Forge (forge.gg), a San Francisco-based game marketing and loyalty platform that hit 1 million users within its first year. Alongside co-founders Dennis 'Thresh' Fong (the world's first professional esports player) and George Ng, Gao is building the infrastructure layer that indie game developers desperately need: no-code loyalty programs, player analytics, and direct community channels - without the walled gardens.