Introducing Claim, a social network based on benefits with friends

Announcing our seed round led by Sequoia Capital, and our previously unannounced pre-seed

We are delighted to announce a significant milestone in Claim's journey: a $4M seed round, led by Sequoia Capital, and our previously unannounced $2M pre-seed led by Susa Ventures and BoxGroup. We will use these funds to grow our engineering team and bring Claim to new geographies.

We’re thankful to our investors, including Sequoia Capital (Josephine Chen and Jess Lee), Susa Ventures (Chad Byers), BoxGroup (Greg Rosen), 6th Man Ventures (Mike Dudas and Serge Kassardjian), Reflexive Capital (Sunny Parikh and Azhar Hussain), A* Capital (Kevin Hartz and Bennett Siegel), GSW Ventures, The Kraft Group, Theia, Luke deWilde, and many others.

Benefits with Friends

Enter: Claim, a new way for friends to connect and for brands to reward their customers.

On Claim, friends earn cash back, exchange rewards, and redeem together by shopping at their favorite brands. The result is a social network that focuses on real-world value, authenticity, and communal experience — rather than manufactured content and reposts. Here’s how it works:

• Your Claim profile is based on where you shop. It uses verified transactions on your linked credit card, so in a world of sponsored posts, your status on Claim actually means something.
• The way to interact on Claim is via “multiplayer rewards.” If you love a brand and your friend hasn’t gone yet, you can send them a special reward: from an acai bowl to a free tee at your favorite streetwear brand. You can exchange rewards, try new places together, and earn status from spending at brands.
• Drops on Claim happen once per week. During a drop, everyone on Claim unwraps a new reward at the same time, and decides whether they want to redeem it, gift it, or trade that reward with eligible friends. If they decide to redeem, the process is completely frictionless — just swipe your credit card, and Claim sends you cash back on Venmo.

Since launching Claim as an invite-only beta in January (4.8 star rating on iOS App Store), we've seen incredible traction with over 10k students across universities in Boston and thousands of customer acquisitions for brand partners. Building on this momentum, we plan to expand across the US next year.

It’s Time to Replace Meta and Google

Advertising is broken. Acquiring new customers has always been hard, but recently it's gotten much harder: the average cost to acquire a customer has more than tripled in the past decade; customer attribution is a black box; and cookies are dying in the smartphone age.

That puts marketers in an increasingly tough position. They’re being asked to grow revenue, improve margins, and reduce marketing spend. And they’re doing it with limited tools: Google, Meta, and TikTok.

Worst of all, consumers are tired of being bombarded with ads — no one is winning in the current system.

Brands, Meet Your Best New Customers

Claim is replacing ads with rewards.

Consumers discover brands on Claim via rewards from friends. For high-growth brands, this word-of-mouth matching creates the perfect introduction to a new customer — a reward from a friend is always better than an ad from an influencer.

And there’s no more guessing game around attribution. In fact, it’s pretty simple. Spending history confirms which consumers have never visited a brand before; then, if someone receives a reward one day and shops the next, Claim claims (sorry) attribution. There’s no complex multitouch or frustrating algorithm changing every week. Instead, it’s just friends connecting over their favorite brands.

Today, we’re working with brands ranging from the Fortune 500 (PepsiCo), to upstart direct-to-consumer fashion brands (For Others), to fast-casual restaurants (Life Alive), and more. Our brand partners all have the same goal in mind — they want to connect authentically with their best new customers.

Early results are promising. For one partner, we hit 97% of their new customer goal in half the expected time, and for another, we’ve acquired customers with a 35% repeat rate within 30 days. Claim is showing signs of becoming the next full-stack marketing platform: from awareness, to initial trial, to superfan.

Join Our Team

As founders, we feel fortunate to be working together. We’ve known each other for 13 years, after meeting on the first day of college. Our skills became the perfect fit to build Claim: Tap was previously a founding engineer at a YC startup, and Sam got his start building e-commerce websites at age 11.

If you’re excited about building a consumer-scale company that replaces advertising, we’d love to hear from you. Check out our open roles here..

We can’t wait to share more with you soon.

Warmly,

Sam and Tap, Co-Founders of Claim