Announcing our $12M Series A led by VMG Technology

The next chapter for Benefits with Friends

Claim is thrilled to announce our $12 million Series A funding round led by VMG Technology, with participation from our prior leads Sequoia Capital and Susa Ventures, as well as our new partners at Lightbank and Metalab Ventures. This brings our total funding to $20M.

With this funding, we’re set to revolutionize how brands connect with Gen Z — by replacing endless scrolling and ads with meaningful social interactions.

The Problem We’re Solving

Claim is solving a fundamental flaw in how we interact on the internet.

Today, we are not being served by social media. We are the product. We scroll for hours, viewing content that has nothing to do with our friends, and increasingly, isn’t even authentic or social.

Platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok isolate us.

We all watch a separate stream of content, punctuated by more and more ads.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this — big tech companies are incentivized to keep us endlessly scrolling. If Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok can keep you scrolling longer, they can literally earn hundreds of billions of dollars in additional ad revenue.

Surprisingly, this system is bad for the brands making ads too. Marketers have no other alternatives for meeting new customers, so they have to pay big tech companies a massive tax that doesn’t even help their customers

There are more and more ads and less and less value: it’s a race to the bottom for everyone.

Why Claim Matters for Us: The Consumers

Claim offers a new paradigm — a delightful new way to interact with friends and brands alike.

And nearly all of it happens offline, in the real world.

Every Thursday, college students on over 70 campuses across the country receive a (sort of insane?) notification that The Drop has begun. They open the Claim app and unwrap a reward from a brand they haven’t tried before.

Rewards on Claim are social-first: when a user is introduced to a brand during The Drop, they can see which of their friends already shop there. They can also compare what their friends received in The Drop, offer trades, and send their rewards as gifts in their group chats.

When users select the reward they’re excited to try, it’s time to close the app — no doomscrolling necessary here. To redeem a reward, users make a purchase with their regular credit card, and Claim sends them cash back on Venmo.

Claim rewards are a reason to reach out to a friend and try something new. Users tell us that The Drop is a highlight of their weeks, and when they’re excited to try new brands, they text their friends to see who else has a reward there, and often go together.

In other words, Claim is a social app that serves as the spark to go hang out with friends — which is what social media is supposed to be for.

Why Claim Matters for Brands

Our viral social shopping app lets brands invest directly in customer acquisition through weekly Drops that help Gen Z discover their new favorite things.

When a user signs up for Claim, they link their credit card to the app, which lets our algorithm understand where they love to shop — and, crucially, where they have not shopped yet — in other words, truly new places. This first-party dataset lets us match brands with potential superfans.

Best of all, Claim does not rely on increasingly frail adtech infrastructure. Elsewhere, return on ad spend (ROAS) is declining, cookies are disappearing, and understanding customers is harder than ever, but Claim’s use of first-party transaction histories allows us to prove attribution at a transaction-by-transaction level.

This is why we feel Claim is a 10x better structure for advertising: you control the cost of acquiring a customer (CPA) from the outset. It’s not an output, but an input, giving you full control and aligning incentives for Claim to bring in high-potential new customers.

The result is a marketing experience that is an order-of-magnitude improvement for both consumers and marketers — rather than paying Meta, Alphabet, or Bytedance, brands pass through customer acquisition costs by giving new customers the opportunity to try their full product experience.

Everyone wins (except the big tech platforms).

Today, and Tomorrow

Today, Claim is on over 70 campuses across the US and growing 50%+ every month.

With our exploding base of Claimers, we’ve also signed and expanded budgets with many of the world-leading brands. From Sweetgreen, to Shake Shack, to [solidcore], to Blank Street Coffee, category-leading brands have found an authentic and engaging way to connect with Gen Z on Claim.

With this new round of funding, we plan to:

• Reach New Markets: While the near-term focus is expanding on college campuses, Claim will also begin off-campus expansion into major cities across the United States.
• Expand Claim’s Merchant Network: We’re adding more brands across industries — from food and beverage, to retail, to experiences. We’re offering both brands and Gen Z even more opportunities to discover their new favorite brands and places.
• Grow our Team: We’re expanding the Claim team, hiring engineers, marketing, and operations to support rapid scaling and product development.

Join Our Team

We’re a small team that’s excited to change consumer internet. To learn more about us, you can read our culture doc, which we wrote as a team and update as the company grows.

If you’re interested in joining, please check out our open roles here.

We’d love to hear from you.

Join the Platform

If you’re a marketer at a brand that wants to acquire new Gen Z customers, we’d love to help you connect in a way that’s easier, more authentic, and more attributable than the big tech platforms.

We’re offering the first 25 brands to sign up from this blog a 20% credit on their first 1,000 acquisitions. Please reach out to hello@claim.co to get set up on Claim and start acquiring your best new customers.

We couldn’t be more excited for what’s next.

Warmly,

Sam and Tap, Co-Founders of Claim