Online brands have long been able to track customer behaviour, which they use to optimise marketing and advertising performance. Offline customers are largely anonymous, limiting marketing efficacy for offline industries such as hospitality and retail. Venu is a white-label loyalty app designed for Android payment terminals, initially aimed at growing loyalty program participation for mid-market and enterprise hospitality businesses. Through this loyalty product, Venu links payment card tokens with identifiable customers and marketing/tracking consent, enabling offline brands to optimise their digital advertising.

Founders Kieran Gardiner and James McArthur bring deep expertise from their experience in hospitality and point-of-sale systems.

Venu has secured three major hardware partnerships (Pax, Ingenico, Verifone), which manufacture ~70% of the world’s payment terminals, as well as payments integration with Verifone New Zealand. They’ve already signed up 40 hospitality customers in New Zealand and their first Australian customer. Their pilot product is now live with promising early data. Typical loyalty participation sits around 10%, Venu is already seeing 60% of customers register after just 3 visits, and 92% register after 10 visits.With this initial validation, Australia and then the UK (London) has been identified as the next target markets, with entry planned for 2025.

In this pre-seed round led by Angel Investors Malborough, Venu are currently raising $2m capital to hire key roles to support growing the merchant base.  To date they have closed $1.3m.