This is how Bilt got built (Part II)

He'd grown up building websites and trading ad space for basketball shoes at age 11.

He'd founded Kairos, a global fellowship spanning 55 countries.

He'd joined Tinder as VP of Product and helped turn it into the largest dating app in the world.

And now, he’d paved the way for Bilt’s success by fighting Washington regulators for 18 months and appealing decisions at midnight until the law finally moved in his favor. 

He'd proven, over and over again, that no door stays closed forever. The right person, with the right obsession, could fix almost anything.

And yet, the legal battle turned out to be the easiest fight he'd face.

Missed Part I? Read the full story on our website.

Last week, we announced our Boston + NY Tech Week lineup.

Join us at our upcoming events.

• Tues. May 26 - Founding GPs VC Omakase (Boston)

• Wed. May 27 - AI Champions Dinner (Boston)

• Tues. June 2 - Founding GPs VC Omakase (New York)

• Wed. June 3 - AI Day (New York)

  • Building the AI Concierge: A Bilt Fireside

  • Bolt Founder Fireside

  • Graphite Founder Fireside

  • AI Champions Dinner

  • The Afterparty ft. Ian Asher

• Tues. June 23 - AI Champions Dinner (San Francisco)

Ethan and Arek 🦄

Up until this point, solving problems had always been Ankur Jain's way through the world, from Humin to Tinder to Kairos. This one, though, was bigger than anything he'd faced before. 

Last we left off, the law itself was the only thing standing in the way of Ankur and what would become Bilt. But after 18 months of meetings with regulators in Washington, the Federal Housing Administration formally ruled that rent payments could count toward a mortgage and reward points toward a down payment. 

Now that the law was on his side, he began incubating his newest idea at Kairos. There was just one thing he hadn't anticipated. 

Building something this ambitious, as you can imagine, is far from easy. It means convincing two very different parties to sit at the same table. Landlords and property owners on one side, and airlines, hotels, and merchants on the other, with renters in the middle. 

This whole model only works if everybody is in. Without merchants, there's nothing to earn toward. Without landlords, there's no rent to reward. 

But nobody wanted to take the first seat.

Landlords and property owners were the first to close the door. "Sorry, you're a startup, and you want to take over our loyalty and payments platform?" 

Airlines weren't any warmer. Their first question was, “How many homes do you have?” 

Without scale, there were no partners. Without partners, there was no scale. 

It was like the classic cold start problem, originally described by Andrew Chen in “The Cold Start Problem.” The hardest moment for any network-based product is the very beginning, when there's no one on the platform yet and therefore no reason for anyone to join. Most startups face this with two sides of a marketplace. Ankur was dealing with at least three.

Waiting was not an option. 

The idea was to go straight to the consumer.

It would be a credit card, one that would reward people for paying rent on time, no matter who owned their building or whether any partners had signed on yet. The points could be saved toward a down payment on a home. And in the meantime, every on-time payment would start building a credit score. It was just enough of a product to go to market and prove the demand was real. 

That was the plan, at least. If the predicament wasn’t precarious enough, just as the company began on the product, COVID-19 hit. Everything was up in the air. 

Yet, what could have been the company’s darkest moment became an unexpected turning point.

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The industries that had been most resistant to the rewards points platform at the beginning, forcing Ankur to pivot, were suddenly the most vulnerable. Landlords, who had spent years assuming rent would always get paid, were now worried about whether people would pay at all or whether anyone would want to live in cities anymore. Airlines, which had operated as if full planes were a birthright, were worrying about people flying on their next planes. The comfortable status quo that had kept every door closed was gone.

The same people who had shown him the door were suddenly very interested in a platform that could help keep renters engaged and payments flowing. So they started to call back, asking how this reward thing would work. And once the first partners came on board, the rest followed, and the B2B2C model started to work. 

The network effect Ankur had been trying to manufacture for two years was now growing on its own. 

Thus, Bilt Rewards was finally launched in June 2021, becoming the first-ever loyalty program and co-branded credit card designed specifically for renters. As Ankur describes it, it was a beta version with a micro ecosystem with a handful of reward partners and properties. It was just enough to generate buzz in the media. 

The product had two sides. On the rewards side, Bilt partnered directly with major property owners and managers, including Blackstone, The Related Companies, and Equity Residential. Through that, residents could earn points automatically on every rent payment, with bonus rewards for things like lease renewals or signing. 

On the card side, the Bilt Mastercard meant that any renter, regardless of who owned their building, could earn points on every rent payment made with the card. Double points on housing and one point per dollar on everything else, all with no annual fee. 

The points could go toward travel, fitness, dining, or directly toward a down payment to buy a home. Add in the credit score benefits that now came from paying rent on time, and a monthly payment that had always built nothing was suddenly building everything. 

Three months later, in September 2021, Bilt closed its first major external funding round of $60 million at a $350 million valuation. And as Ankur always intended, there were no traditional venture firms at the table. 

Instead, the round was led by Wells Fargo, the card issuer, along with Mastercard, the transaction processor. It was backed by some of the largest real estate owners in the country, including existing partners like Starwood Capital Group, the firm led by Barry Sternlicht. Yes, the very same person who had first introduced Ankur to the idea that loyalty programs could be more profitable than the core business itself.  

Every single investor had a direct reason beyond the financial returns to want Bilt to succeed, because the product sat at the very core of their own business. The incentives were aligned.

And the early numbers gave them reason to believe. Within just 3 months of launching, the program had already rolled out across more than 2 million rental units across the country. 

Six months later, in March 2022, the partnership with Wells Fargo took on a new dimension. The Bilt Mastercard, until then available by invitation only, was officially opened to the public for the first time. With Wells Fargo operating more than 5,000 branches across the country, the distribution potential was enormous and opened a path for all 109 million renters in the U.S. to access a card that turned their biggest monthly expense into something that worked for them. 

It was the result of years of patience, building without venture money, trying to get a complex net of businesses on the table without the pressure to show numbers he didn't have yet. He'd always said the most dangerous thing a founder could do was raise too early from people who may not be a good long-term fit. This was proof he meant it. 

Ankur is the first to admit that timing played a role he couldn't have scripted. Bilt wasn't the first company to think about rewards for rent payments. But timing is only half the story. Businesses are won on execution, and Bilt just out-executed everyone else. 

But this is not our happy ending yet, because Ankur's plans were way more ambitious.

The 2021 beta had proven that renters wanted this kind of product. 2022 was evidence that landlords would come on board and that the three-sided marketplace puzzle could actually be solved. Now the question was, how far could it go?

Ankur saw something bigger taking shape on the horizon, and decided to raise the capital to pursue it. In October 2022, Bilt closed a $150 million growth round backed by Left Lane Capital, Wells Fargo, Greystar, and Invitation Homes, reaching a $1.5 billion valuation and officially entering unicorn status. Two months later, the Bilt Mastercard was named Best No Annual Fee Credit Card by The Points Guy, a travel website and blog.  

So what was Ankur’s goal? Despite starting as a rewards program for rent, the more people used it, the clearer it became that Bilt was becoming a platform connecting where people live with everything around them.

Today, just four years later, Bilt operates across roughly 25% of all apartment buildings in the U.S. When you move into a building on the Bilt network, you sign up as a member as part of accepting your lease. From there, every on-time rent payment earns you rewards, and the domino effect starts. 

Properties benefit from higher on-time payments and a loyalty platform that helps them retain residents. Merchants, such as restaurants and fitness studios, gain direct access to people who have just moved into the neighborhood and are already holding points they want to spend. Because those merchants are right there, in the same streets where these residents live, they become the natural place to use them. Much better than flyers slipped under doors.

The points flow out of rent and back into the local economy, and the whole system feeds itself, creating a network that gets more valuable with every new member, building, and merchant that joins.

Perfect. This is the future Ankur saw. But how did Bilt actually accomplish such an impressive feat? 

Flash back to 2022, and Ankur started rethinking commerce locally. 

Another opportunity, he realized, was removing friction from the everyday moments that already cost people time and money, and nowhere was that friction more absurd than in healthcare spending.

Americans lose $4 billion a year in unspent FSA funds. It’s money already taken from their paychecks, sitting in accounts they can't figure out how to use, because the process of identifying eligible items and filing for reimbursement is painful enough that most people just give up. 

Bilt sat down with Walgreens, one of the biggest pharmacy chains in the U.S., and built the first-ever automatic FSA savings program. With it, you swipe any linked card at a Walgreens in the network, and Bilt automatically pulls your receipt, identifies every eligible item, and files the reimbursement with your healthcare plan, with zero effort required.

And it doesn't stop there. 

In January 2026, Bilt launched the Bilt Card 2.0, three new credit cards. For the first time, homeowners could earn rewards on mortgage payments too, a single platform that rewards you at every stage of your housing journey, from first apartment to owned home. 

The cards earn points on rent, mortgage, and everyday spending, with no transaction fees on housing payments and no annual cap on housing points. 

And the story still doesn’t stop there. In February 2026, Bilt introduced the Neighborhood Concierge, a service that perhaps best captures what the platform was always building toward.

Instead of juggling apps, calls, and reservations, you tell it what you need, and it handles it. So paying rent, booking a table at a nearby restaurant, scheduling a fitness class, or calling a ride. Bilt describes it as the world's best hotel concierge, except it's built into where you live.

Ankur compares Bilt to Amazon. Amazon started by selling books online and just kept adding to the experience, layer by layer, until the whole thing became indispensable. Bilt is on a similar trajectory.

It started at home with points on rent, then expanded to everything around the home, and now it's threading all of it together into a single and easy experience that, the more you use it, the less sense it makes to leave.

The magic lay precisely in doing this insane work that nobody else had the guts to do.

It started with one question in a 2018 pitch deck. Now, Bilt is a $10 billion company operating across 5.5 million homes and thousands of neighborhood merchants across the U.S.  

However, Ankur is quick to remind us that this is still the early chapter. Every week, his inbox fills with the same message in different languages: Bilt for Spain, Bilt for Dubai, Bilt for India, Bilt for Brazil. And nothing, he says, would make him happier than jumping on a plane tomorrow and signing up housing partners and merchants around the world. 

But he won't. At least, not yet. The same discipline that kept him out of the venture capital rat race in the early days is the same discipline keeping global expansion on hold while the foundation at home gets stronger.

That long-term thinking is a mindset inherited long before he ever built a company. He says that immigrant families don't optimize for the next quarter. Instead, they build for the next generation. Bilt, in many ways, is the same bet. The infrastructure being laid today, connecting rent, credit, rewards, local commerce, and mortgages into a single seamless experience, is designed to compound over decades. 

The blockchain handbags are still out there. But so is the other kind of founder, the one who couldn’t walk away from a problem nobody wanted to solve and is now helping reimagining entire neighborhoods, one rent and mortgage payment at a time.

Pick problems you can't stop thinking about. 

Ankur puts it simply: if you see a problem you get stuck on and can't stop thinking about, that is the company you should start. The rent problem wasn't the most obvious opportunity in his network, but it was just the one he couldn't walk away from, and that stubbornness turned out to be the most important qualification he had.

When the door is closed, go around it. 

The D2C credit card was never part of the original plan. What started as a workaround ended up becoming the proof of concept that convinced the entire industry that the demand was real. Sometimes, constraints have a way of forcing better solutions than the original idea.

Do business with friends.

When Bilt closed its first funding round, every single person at the table had a business reason to want the product to succeed that went beyond a return on paper. As Ankur put it at our fireside, “You can hire a mercenary, you can’t hire a partner.”

If you only talk to the same people, you will only see the same problems. 

When everyone around you shares the same background, references, and blind spots, the problems that matter become completely invisible. The opportunity that eventually became a $10 billion company was completely ignored by an industry too busy looking inward to notice it.

The network is the product. 

Bilt works because every participant makes it more valuable for everyone else. The bigger the network grows, the harder it becomes to leave and the more compelling it becomes to join. As Ankur noted at our fireside, the power is in the network itself. Products can be copied, but a network is not something you can replicate overnight.