The company, which made its name by offering rewards to consumers for rent payments, on Tuesday (Nov. 10) announced the launch of its Bilt Neighborhood operating system. The artificial intelligence-powered platform is designed to open Bilt’s technology and neighborhood commerce network to businesses and communities beyond housing.
“The opportunity is substantial. Of the roughly $8 trillion U.S. retail market, about $6.6 trillion of annual U.S. retail and food-services spending occurs in person, yet many local businesses continue to rely on disconnected systems, manual processes, and limited tools for customer acquisition, loyalty, and measurement,” the company said in a news release.
Bilt is bringing together AI-powered technology, existing commerce infrastructure, and community-based distribution to help close that gap.
The platform is designed to help businesses reach relevant audiences from residential communities, as well as places like offices, hotels and sports teams. It also allows them to add Bilt AI agents to their systems to help manage things like guest services, customer communications and marketing.
“Local physical world businesses have a chance to get the capabilities and tools that have previously been reserved for only online sellers,” Bilt Founder and CEO Ankur Jain said in an interview with Bloomberg News.
“Real-world mom-and-pop small businesses have to go to such absurd lengths to be able to reach customers and track what’s working.”
And that kind of monitoring can pay off, as shown by research from PYMNTS Intelligence’s “The SMB Growth Gap: What Leaders Track That Others Miss.”
This survey of 526 U.S. small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) found that companies with formal customer acquisition tracking were more than twice as likely to see revenue growth as businesses with no tracking.
The research found that 51% of SMBs using analytics, customer relationship management systems or promotional codes upped their revenue in 2025. That compares with 34% of SMBs using only informal observation and 22% of firms with no tracking.
“The report doesn’t establish that tracking caused the growth,” PYMNTS wrote in September. “Still, measurement can work like a compass, helping owners see where demand is coming from before they spend their next marketing dollar.”
Bilt’s new offering comes a little more than a week after the company announced it was acquiring sports and entertainment loyalty platform Lava.
The $300 million deal joins Lava’s technology and partnerships with 56 professional sports franchises with Bilt’s “rapidly expanding neighborhood commerce ecosystem,” as the company said in a news release.
