Amazon started with books. DoorDash started with restaurants. Uber and Lyft started with rides. Every great commerce platform of the last two decades built outward from the merchant, and they built remarkable things. But none of them started where life actually starts.

They started with what you buy. We started with where you live.

That choice, which felt contrarian when we made it, turned out to be the foundation the next era of commerce has always needed. The technology industry is now in a full sprint toward a vision of AI that acts in the world on your behalf, not just answering questions but taking action: making reservations, arranging rides, handling payments, all in the neighborhood where your life actually happens.

For that to work, you need to be integrated into the things that matter most to people's everyday lives. You need to start where trust is highest and context is deepest. You need to start at home. We did, five years ago, and we've been building toward this ever since.

01 — THE MEMBERSHIP FOR WHERE YOU LIVE

Your home shapes the places where you spend.

Bilt is the membership for where you live. It comes with your home, through your apartment building or your mortgage, and it's built around the most important place in your life. Through it, you earn rewards on your rent or mortgage, get connected to the businesses around you, and now have a concierge that manages your neighborhood life the way a great hotel manages a stay. The day you sign a lease or close on a mortgage, you make dozens of decisions that will guide your daily life for years: which gym is convenient, which restaurants become your regulars, which pharmacy you'll use, even where you grab coffee on the way to work. Where you choose to live shapes the vast majority of your spending decisions. It's the single most consequential economic choice most people make, repeated throughout their lives.

And yet, housing has often been treated as purely transactional: $1,500, $3,500, $5,000 per month, with no connection between the building and its residents, or the neighborhood it anchors. A relationship reduced to a monthly obligation, when it has always deserved so much more.

People light up at the idea of a night at a great hotel, even at $1,500. There's something about the experience that makes it feel worth every penny. Paying that same amount in rent each month has rarely felt the same way. We built Bilt to change that.

Housing alone accounts for more than $2 trillion of annual spend in the United States. Add the restaurants, gyms, pharmacies, and daily life that clusters around where people live, and you begin to see the true scale of what home-anchored commerce represents. It is the largest untapped market in the history of consumer spending. We are building it.

To the members who joined early and bet on this vision: you are the reason it is what it is. The platform got stronger with every person who chose to make Bilt the center of where they live.

02 — WHAT WE BUILT

A hospitality platform for where you live.

Bilt entered housing by pioneering rewards on rent, the first time paying rent generated meaningful new value for the person paying it. Credit reporting, points toward travel, fitness, dining, and a future mortgage. We demonstrated that residents would engage deeply with a platform built around their home.

But capturing housing was only the beginning. Shopify didn't build a storefront; it built the infrastructure that stores run on. Bilt is doing that for the neighborhood: the operating layer connecting homes to the commerce around them. That meant integrating into systems that touch the home: maintenance, amenities, payments, leasing, move-in logistics, and building tools that let property operators create personalized, branded experiences for their residents, the way a great hotel knows your name, your preferences, your history.

We call this the Bilt Alliance: properties that have embedded Bilt into how they operate, not just how they market. A platform through which a property can deliver a hospitality-grade experience to its residents at scale. Not a generic welcome email, but a real introduction to the neighborhood. A membership that makes residents feel recognized, taken care of, and connected from the day they move in.

03 — THE NEIGHBORHOOD LAYER

Home brought us in. Neighborhood commerce is what we built from there.

By becoming the largest housing platform rewarding residents on housing payments, we also became the most natural bridge to everything in the neighborhood around it. Move-in is when every local spending habit resets; it can be the first time in years someone might choose a new gym, a new coffee spot, a new go-to for dinner. Bilt is there at that exact moment.

We spent years building deep, two-way integrations into restaurant reservation systems, fitness booking platforms, pharmacy networks, rideshare providers, hotel loyalty programs, and more. Integrations connect the member to the merchant from discovery all the way through to payment and experience. And throughout every interaction, the network can automatically surface rewards, complimentary items, bonus points, exclusive access.

An example of how this looks in practice:

04 — THE CONCIERGE LAYER

This is what agentic commerce actually looks like, and it starts at home.

Everyone is talking about AI agents. The technology is real and arriving fast. But most AI today is still just information; it tells you about the world. Real agentic commerce changes the world around you. Your grocery order arrives before you get home. The restaurant you've been meaning to try has a reservation waiting. Your gym membership is set up the week you move in. A maintenance issue gets resolved without a phone call. The AI isn't answering questions, it's taking action, in your neighborhood, in real time.

For any of this to work, the AI has to be genuinely connected to the systems where your life runs, with the ability to take action all the way through. That kind of connection doesn't start with a search engine. It starts with the place you trust most. It starts with home.

Here's how Bilt built toward this, one layer at a time:

The concierge at a great hotel doesn't give you a list of restaurants. It makes the reservation, tells the kitchen you're coming, and charges it to your room. We're building that for where you actually live, for every day, not just a weekend.

Members are already using the concierge across every part of their neighborhood life.

Top categories by concierge conversations

05 — THE CARD, IN CONTEXT

We rebuilt the co-brand card to focus on the neighborhood network. Here's what happened.

Bilt's commerce network is open to all members regardless of how they pay. Any payment method earns rewards and unlocks access to the neighborhood ecosystem, and we work with nearly every major bank to create unique experiences specifically for their cardholders in our ecosystem. Our co-brand card* is designed for the members who want even more from Bilt: deeper rewards, richer benefits, and compounding value the more they engage with everything around their home.

Card 1.0 proved we could win housing. Card 2.0 was built to prove the same platform could win the neighborhood, rewarding most deeply the members who want to engage with that ecosystem. The restructure meant change, and not every 1.0 cardholder came along.

But what happened with those who did tells a story worth paying attention to. Most notably, 83% of the original active cardholders requested a 2.0 card, while housing spend stayed consistent month over month (with a slight drop in rent made up for with the addition of mortgage). Here is what we found most interesting: 

But the most important signal came from our neighborhood partner network. With fewer cards in-market, engagement with Bilt merchant partners didn't decline. It surged, across every category, in just the first 30 days:

Monthly co-brand spend at Bilt's neighborhood partners

The same members who engaged with housing now engage with the neighborhood. That's the shift we've been building toward.

*Cardless Inc. is the servicer of the Bilt Cards. Cardless is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bilt Cards are issued by Column N.A., Member FDIC, pursuant to license from Mastercard International Incorporated.

06 — ON THE GROWING PAINS

When you build this fast, some things get harder before they get better.

The past year was the most operationally complex in Bilt's history. Building this platform means integrating simultaneously across an extraordinary range of systems: restaurant reservations, point-of-sale platforms, fitness booking, pharmacy networks, hotel loyalty programs, ride-share APIs, mortgage systems, payment providers, and banking infrastructure, all while running millions of housing payments every month.

Every one of those integrations has its own requirements and its own places where things can go wrong. We were scaling all of them at the same time as a full co-brand card transition and a mortgage platform launch.

In the process, we fell behind on the thing that matters most: being responsive fast enough for our customers. Response times went up. Our support experience didn't reflect the standard we set for our members. That's on us.

We've been continuously growing our in-person support teams and enhancing our support infrastructure to help ensure a positive Bilt customer experience across this expanding range of activities. We are getting back to where we need to be.

This is a continuous commitment. Our members trust us with the most important place in their lives. That trust has to be earned every single day.

07 — THE NETWORK AHEAD

The bigger the network, the more powerful every home is in it.

Every property that joins the Alliance brings new residents into a platform that connects them to their neighborhood from day one. Every resident brings their spending life to the merchants around them. Every merchant that integrates becomes more valuable to the members moving in around the corner. Every benefit the concierge unlocks makes the next interaction richer. The network keeps getting stronger, and it all flows from the home.

As we scale, we are building the largest commerce platform connecting neighborhoods through a shared membership experience: one where your home is the check-in, your neighborhood is the amenity, and the concierge is always on.

Bilt is the membership for where you live. We're not done building it. Not even close.

Ankur Jain, Founder & CEO, Bilt

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Media kit can be found here.