GET EARLY ACCESS
Every dollar you run through payroll now earns rewards you can redeem for travel, cash back, gift cards, and a few things we’re still cooking up.
INTRODUCING THERA REWARDS
Earn Points On Payroll
Today, I'm proud to introduce Thera Rewards.
Thera is the first platform that lets companies earn points on payroll. For many of our members, payroll is their largest expense. For decades, payroll has been locked out of the rewards economy.
Until now.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MANUFACTURED CURRENCIES
1981 - American Airlines launches AAdvantage, the first frequent flyer program. The insight: reward the behavior you want more of with a currency that only works inside your system. Within a year, every major airline copies it.
Late '80s - Amex, Visa, and Mastercard extend the model to general spend, rebating a slice of interchange back to the customer as points. Every dollar a consumer spends now earns something.
2021 - Bilt proves the model works for rent, the single largest check most consumers write each month.
Each program followed the same pattern: take a large recurring expense and build a flywheel around it.
WHAT LOYALTY IS ACTUALLY WORTH
It's easy to dismiss points as a marketing expense. The airline industry would disagree.
Delta SkyMiles at $31.8 billion, American's AAdvantage at $26.7 billion, and United's MileagePlus at $25.3 billion. At multiple points over the last decade, each of these programs has been worth more than the airline that operates it.
When the pandemic grounded the planes, the Big 3 mortgaged their loyalty programs instead of their aircraft. United raised $6.8B against MileagePlus in mid-2020. Delta raised $9B against SkyMiles that fall. American raised $10B against AAdvantage in March 2021, the largest airline-backed financing in history.
Why payroll
Payroll is the largest line on most companies' PnLs. It's perfectly recurring, highly predictable, and until now, locked out of the rewards economy entirely.
Thera Rewards changes that. One point for every dollar of payroll run through Thera.
Points will be transferable to major airlines and hotels, or redeemable against the SaaS tools businesses already run on.
WHY THERA
For decades, consumer fintech fought for share of wallet. Issuers rebated interchange to win the top slot in a customer's pocket. Chase Sapphire and AMEX are the canonical plays.
Thera competes for something different: share of cashflow.
Thera is a finance OS for modern companies. For many of our members, every dollar in and every dollar out of their business flows through Thera rails. Rewards are how those flows compound. The more cashflow you route through Thera, the richer the points get.
DAY ONE
This was a huge effort across product, engineering, and marketing. This is day one.
Thera Rewards is in beta now. Sign up for early access at
— Akhil