Loyalty points platform

Headquarters: Redwood City, U.S.

CEO: Jigar Shah

Website: Miles

Founding date: 2018

Investment: $20 million

The Miles platform and app allows anyone with a smartphone to earn miles for all of their travel.

For consumers, it’s a loyalty platform that rewards daily movement, with healthier and more eco-friendly modes of transport, such as public transit, biking or even walking, earning more miles than driving a car, for example.

Users can redeem their miles for personalized rewards from more than 250 leading retailers, participate in challenges to earn gift cards as well as donate their miles to raise money for charity.

PhocusWire coverage:

Founders Jigar Shah, Paresh Jain and Parin Shah

Strategic goals for 2022

Miles has not only reimagined travel rewards but created a platform where mobility is universally rewarded — all while delivering incredible value to our partners. Looking forward, our goals are to:

Continue to grow our marketplace with new reward partners around the globe - unlocking new ways for users to get value for their miles regardless of where they travel. In the future, users will be able to exchange their miles for PayPal credits, cash into their bank account or crypto, as well as transferring their miles to use various airlines' frequent flyer programs.
Continue to expand our partnerships with city and transportation providers. In the past two years, we partnered with a number of cities and transportation partners to incentivize greener travel. Now as travel opens up, we’re revisiting the next phase of those partnerships, as well as launching new programs with cities with the most recent being the City of Orlando.
Expand our white label partnerships with transportation providers. The B2B white label portion of our business also continues to rapidly grow as we work with auto and transportation brands to create their own rewards app and experience.

Lessons learned over the last year

Our vision at Miles is to deliver value for every mile traveled, across every mode of transportation. In 2020 as the pandemic started, global travel slowed to a near standstill. Not only did air travel drop by more than 75%, trips via ground transportation were significantly lower - with less than half the number of car, rideshare or transit trips taken by our users.

We quickly re-evaluated and shifted our approach — rewarding users for staying at home. We also worked with partners to add rewards people could more readily use during the pandemic - from discounts on e-commerce and home-delivery services to online workout classes. In the months that followed, we saw a steady and dramatic rise in the number of rewards redeemed on our platform. There are several factors that helped to drive this growth.

The first is that we continued to extend the value of miles for users. In the past year, we have more than doubled the number of rewards available on our platform while tripling revenue. Today, more than 250 leading brands offer 350 personalized rewards on our marketplace.

We also introduced a number of new ways to redeem miles, such as raffles and weekly activity challenges where you can unlock gift cards giveaways from retailers such as Amazon. During the pandemic, we also introduced Miles for charity, allowing users to donate their miles to the charity of their choice.