Berlin loyalty program company Loyi, a brand of Enefty Technologies, has raised €425,000 Pre-Seed funding.
DG Nexolution is a major investor, enabling the startup to offer its programs to Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken. Vision Lab by Earlybird Venture Capital, Startup Wise Guys, 3 Comma Capital, and other investors are also investors.
The Loyi platform allows companies to set interactive challenges for their customers. These include participating in events, interacting on social media, or purchasing products, part of the platform's gamification aspects. For completing these tasks, customers receive digital rewards that they can exchange for exclusive brand experiences, limited products, or other offers.
I spoke to Giorgi Jashiashvili, co-founder and CEO of Loyi to find out more. According to Jashiashvili, conventional loyalty programs don’t work.
“I may get an email for a 20 per cent discount on my birthday. I don't even know what product I can use it for. Or think of the stamp card, buy nine copies and get 10 for free. It’s very boring.
If you are a traditional brand and you keep connecting or communicating with customers and potential customers in the same way that you were doing 10 years ago, it just simply doesn't resonate.”
Most loyalty programs are disconnected from how consumers shop — don’t get me started in air miles — and do little to enable meaningful brand engagement.
Nowadays, consumers, especially Gen Z, need things to be fast and engaging; their engagement with loyalty programs is rapidly decreasing.
Mindful of gaming's popularity, Loyi wondered, “How can we use gamification principles to make loyalty more engaging and reward the whole experience?” Its answer is Web3 technologies and gamification.
Specifically the company, founded in 2021, is developing a no-code white-label version of its platform that offers all the benefits of blockchain technology while eliminating challenges. Jashiashvili detailed:
“We remove all the technical difficulty, so it's no-code software that any market manager could use without any technical education or training.”
It's a digital-first approach—“No one wants to carry around a loyalty card,” according to Jashiashvili—which caters to consumers where they are right now, not waiting for them to get a card out of their wallet.
While many people think of Bored Ape and nefarious scams when they think about NFTs, Loyi shows brands how they can save money and increase engagement, especially with hard-to-reach younger generations.
Using Loyi’s platform, for example, brands can attract and retain consumer interest through granular initiatives such as competitions, digital quests, and points awarded for watching promotional videos that can be used towards purchases.
“So at the end of the day, our big goal is to get from someone from a follower to a brand ambassador. It's one thing to just send a cold email saying, hey, you got a 20 per cent discount and it's another way to say like, oh, vote for your favourite products. What do you prefer? Offer meaningful engagement and make them part of the decision-making.”
This also of course increases market intelligence for brands. “And that's the promise of Web3. It's about community and smart engagement.”
Founded at the end of 2021, it collaborated with renowned lifestyle brands such as NH Hotels, United Colors of Benetton, and Golden Tulip.
Pilot projects resulted in brands gaining 2X more engagement on social media and increasing email open rates from 40 per cent to 80 per cent.
With the new strategic partnership, the plan is to onboard Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken as the first customers in the banking sector to use the white-label version of the Loyi platform. This white-label solution enables Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken to offer customised loyalty programs under their own brand.
Jashiashvili, notes:
"Reaching younger target groups and building long-term loyalty is crucial for any brand, especially in the financial sector, where customers need to trust the bank with their finances from a young age."
Volksbank and DDX offer a loyalty program with a network of 18,000 vendors.
Jashiashvili explains:
“We are bringing our solution into their ecosystem. It's a perfect match for interoperability and extending into incentives like digital collectables.
Our platform will especially aid regional retailing in determining local market insights such as popular brands and verticals, which can lead to increased vendors, and in turn, users are happy because they get personalised recommendations and incentives.”
DG Nexolution's decision to invest in Loyi demonstrates trust in the future of Web3 technologies and their potential in the loyalty sector. DG Nexolution gains two seats on Loyi's supervisory board through this investment to actively contribute to the company's development.
According to Marco Rummer, CEO of DG Nexolution:
"The investment in Enefty Technologies results from an intensive engagement with developments and technologies in the crypto sector and tokenisation. It strengthens DG Nexolution's positioning as a pioneer of top-notch solutions for the cooperative financial group in our business fields.
We are consistently implementing our strategy of integrating specialised products and services into the DG Nexolution group through subsidiaries or participations.
Having our experts Tanja Rothermel and Tobias Psyk as future representatives on the supervisory board shows that we are not only investing financially but also want to contribute to the further development of the company, in order to offer our customers solutions for their needs based on these technologies."
Lead image: Loyi. Photo: uncredited
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