Monex, Recruit and LINE’s subsidiary Unblock Ventures back blockchain loyalty startup Loyyal

Blockchain powered loyalty and rewards platform Loyyal has announced that it has secured investments from Asian giants including Recruit, Monex Group, and Unblock Ventures, which is LINE Corporation's blockchain investment company.

One of Loyyal's original Series Seed investors, Dubai-based Hayaat Group, also participated in the round. The total amount raised has not been disclosed.

The San Francisco-based firm said that Recruit, Monex and Unblock Ventures will provide it with “unparalleled access to the Asian market for loyalty and incentives.”

“Having worked in Tokyo's banking sector for several years earlier in my career, I'm intimately aware of how powerful loyalty programs are in the region,” Greg Simon, CEO, and Founder of Loyyal said. “This perspective factored greatly to our initial concepts when creating Loyyal, so it's a culmination of those aspirations to now have the support of Unblock Ventures, subsidiary of LINE Corporation, Recruit Co., Ltd., and Monex Group in expanding our growing client based across Asia-Pacific."

Oki Matsumoto, Chairman and CEO of Monex Group, sees a large market opportunity in Asia-Pacific for Loyyal. He said:

“Loyyal's platform presents the most capable approach we have seen to bring liquidity to the more than five trillion US dollars worth of value locked up globally in consumer's loyalty accounts.”

Loyyal leverages blockchain technology to offer an interoperable loyalty and rewards platform that helps firms unlock the billions of dollars in value held captive in legacy loyalty programs today. Earlier in February, it launched the version 2.0 of the Loyyal Product Suite. In its press release announcing the launch, the company said:

“This release improves transaction processing throughput across the company’s distributed nodes by more than 700%, or nearly 800 transactions per second, per program operator on our network.

“In addition, this new release increases database performance by more than 12x by storing metadata associated with blockchain transactions to a more modernized, high-performance distributed database architecture.”