00:00What are you using the $150 million for, Dara?
00:03Hey, Caroline, great to see you. Thanks for having me.
00:05At Imprint, our bet has been the same since we started the company five years ago.
00:08We want to be the modern co-branded credit card and loyalty platform for the world's great brands.
00:13And we've raised this capital to allow us to double down on that strategy.
00:16Our bet was relatively simple when we started the company,
00:19that the world's biggest banks weren't building good enough experience for great brands
00:23to launch co-branded credit cards.
00:25And that's been true.
00:26And what you see is we've taken a siloed experience that used to live in the bank's app
00:30and put it at the heart of our partner's experience.
00:33And so when you open our partner's app or you open their website, you can engage with the card.
00:39You can pay your bill.
00:41You can check your balance.
00:42And that puts you one tap, one click away from buying your next bag of groceries and booking your next flight.
00:47And for our partners, that has meant huge increases in lifetime value.
00:51It's why brands like Booking.com, Rakuten, Crate & Barrel are choosing Imprint over legacy banks.
00:56And why we continue to focus on this mission with the money we've raised.
00:59A mission that was actually incubated in Thrive Capital.
01:02They participate in this round.
01:03Ribbit, Dig, Kleiner Perkins, Spice Capital and the like, Dara.
01:06But I've sort of got a bigger question of just how many of these credit cards am I going to have,
01:13or even a debit card that you're looking at now?
01:15Am I, as an individual, going to have a Booking.com one and a Rakuten one?
01:18And I'm going to have a Turkish Airlines?
01:19At what point do I become exhausted with all the offerings?
01:23Well, what you see is we're working with partners that demand a lot of share of wallet from their customers, right?
01:28Like if you think about Booking.com, they're winning against airlines.
01:32They're winning against hotel companies.
01:33And customers are going there to book the full trip experience.
01:36And so by partnering with Booking or by partnering with Rakuten that's taking such a large share of online commerce for customers,
01:43we end up being a meaningful share of each customer's wallet.
01:47And so you're able to give them rewards for a huge portion of their spend.
01:51We would agree that very small fractional brands probably don't need credit cards.
01:55But more and more we partner with brands that are parallel winners in their categories.
01:59They're winning in all of e-com.
02:00They're winning in all of travel.
02:01And so we get to give customers way more value for a bigger portion of their wallet.
02:06And so more and more customers sign up for that benefit rather than thinking I'm going to have 50 versions of a credit card.
02:12Now, I'm doing the inevitable AI question, but I imagine an awful lot of this is about personalization,
02:17understanding where my next offering or next purchase is coming from, making sure you're meeting me where I am at.
02:23So how much are you looking at AI?
02:24How much are you having to hire in AI?
02:27Yeah, we think about it as kind of two sides of the coin, right?
02:29One is the customer experience that you've mentioned, and one is how we build the company.
02:33On customer experience, automation and AI let us personalize how much rewards you get, how we talk to the customer,
02:40how the experience even shapeshifts for the customer, and more and more investing in that.
02:44So it feels radically different to anything that a bank has ever provided in the past for these brands or for these customers.
02:50The really interesting thing, and maybe it's not as apparent under the surface,
02:55is we get to rebuild what looks like a financial company or even a fintech in the time of automation and AI.
03:02And so over the last year, we've grown the business by almost 300%.
03:05We've grown headcount by 20%.
03:07At every turn, we get to choose, are we going to build a new team here?
03:11Are we going to invest in technology and automation so we don't have to hire a team of people?
03:15We can actually scale the company using technology, which is an amazing opportunity that I don't think anybody has ever had.
03:22Wow. So I imagine that $150 million doesn't actually go that much on talent.
03:27It goes more on the marketing of your product.
03:30What does it double down on in particular?
03:33Yeah, three things.
03:33One is we continue to grow, right?
03:35So we obviously continue to market to customers, but we're not burning all this capital.
03:39If you think about the market we're in, big brands can choose 100-year-old banks or they can choose imprint.
03:44If you choose a 100-year-old bank, you probably sleep really well at night.
03:47If you choose a relatively new company, maybe you worry a little more.
03:51And so we just want to be very well capitalized to make that choice easy.
03:55Bucket two is more financial products.
03:57We have the credit card today that serves many of the brands' customers.
04:01But depending on your financial life, you don't want a credit card.
04:03Maybe you want a debit card with more rewards.
04:05So more of those products.
04:07And then the last thing is, as we've talked about, how do we build a company using automation and AI and scale without headcount?
04:14Which is an amazing opportunity relative to where we would have been 10 years ago.
04:18You see public company FinTechs today with thousands and thousands of employees.
04:22We get to make a decision every time.
04:24Do we hire or do we build?
04:25And more and more we get to build.
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