Investing in Kalder
Shared Infrastructure for Brands 3.0
It’s no secret that loyalty programs have been underperforming — for both brands and consumers.
Despite spending billions of dollars annually on loyalty programs, majority of brands believe they are largely ineffective. It’s no different for consumers either. Loyalty programs have a lot of constraints which makes them tough to use (even boring) and makes it hard for consumers to engage with brands. People don’t feel like they belong to a community; usually the programs make the relationship very transactional. As a result, the average household in the US has over 21 loyalty program memberships. But, the household only actively uses 44% of these¹.
In short, it has never been more important to power loyalty. Yet traditional loyalty programs aren’t up to the task. And this is where Kalder comes in.
Kalder transforms loyalty programs by building the shared infrastructure for brand loyalty.
Kalder is a unified, no-code web3 tool for brands to build their engagement and experience economy.
With Kalder, brands can build dynamic NFT memberships, establish contribute-to-earn incentives, create quests to improve consumer engagement, power interoperable membership schemes between different brands, and build shared-CRMs to micro-segment users & get state-of-the-art customer analytics. And in doing all of the above, brands don’t need any web3 experience, as they perform all tasks through a no-code tool.
Consumers, on the other hand, benefit from Kalder’s offering by becoming owners through $BRAND tokens launched by brands. Through $BRAND tokens & NFT membership cards, members get access to social groups, benefits, premium merchandise and gamified quests, giving them both a financial stake in the success of the brand and social capital within the brand’s community.
You might be thinking that this is nothing new, and that there are other NFT minting services out there, to which I would say — Kalder is not an NFT minting service. Minting NFTs only incentivizes short-term activity. There is no “post-minting engagement” from consumers, as these services do not provide an ingrained loyalty infrastructure for brands to continuously engage customers in the long-term. Typically, they tap into the “exploratory marketing budget” and die out after a short time.
The contrast is evident in Kalder’s track record so far: For its first customer, Kalder enabled >2,500 memberships and created >5,000 unique wallets. Through these memberships, there were >2,800 attendees to members-only events (including +1s =)), an 68% increase in social shares and referrals, and an average 80 NPS post-membership.
Gökçe is the perfect person to lead a company in this space. A Berkeley graduate, Gökçe was employee #18 at Opensea, where she worked on partnerships with brands like Christie’s, Vogue, Gucci & LVMH. She was an early employee at Celo & Robinhood, while also holding a Fashion Scholarship Fund! Her co-founder Jeff was an early developer at Olympus DAO, and led the initial development of core contracts. The co-founders are backed by a team of top talent who are Figma, Duolingo and Lumen alumni.
So naturally, we were very excited to meet Gökçe & Jeff, and are even more excited now to announce that we will be leading their pre-seed round! We are looking forward to the journey along with investors including Emergence Capital, Human Capital, 8VC, Indigo Fund, OpenSea Ventures and several prominent angels. Welcome to the 500 Family =)
