What is Bilt Hospitality?
Company exec Sam Bakhshandehpour talks me through it.
Bilt Hospitality launched just as I arrived in Philadelphia for a work event last weekend. Bilt, a loyalty and payments company, announced its new restaurant-focused loyalty and experience play with a slick, five-minute video featuring 21 top chefs and restaurateurs. Twenty of the video’s stars are men; just one is a woman, restaurateur Elizabeth Blau, 16th in line.
A few people at the restaurant industry conference I attended in Philly mentioned the video — to be honest, more people clocked the lack of gender diversity than the message — and we collectively had more questions than answers.
Thankfully, Sam Sam Bakhshandehpour, Bilt’s new president of local merchants and former CEO of Jose Andres Group, offered to explain it all to me (and my podcast co-host Brandon) late last week.
“These are all longtime friends and partners,” he told us during Friday’s interview, “these are all people that are leaders in our industry.”
It’s a simple premise, Bakhshandehpour continued: “How do we connect all the various touch points to our guests and go back to the essence of hospitality, which is owning the relationship and enhancing the guest experience?”
Bilt Hospitality calls itself an “orchestration platform” for good service at restaurants, funneling diners into seats via AI-powered “neighborhood concierges” and handing operators AI tools to help them create, extend, and facilitate the kind of extra-special moments every top restaurant name loves to share. It’s all built on Bilt’s core business: offering people points for paying their rent or mortgage. But the hospitality of it all has Bakhshandehpour talking about disjointed restaurant systems and seamless guest experiences — common tropes in restaurant technology.
So… what is it, exactly?
Bilt Hospitality sounds flashy — a restaurant tech product backed by a hot finance startup worth $10 billion (at the time of its last announced fundraise) — but the premise is actually pretty simple.
“Everything that Bilt is able to help a restaurant do, restaurants can already do,” restaurateur Will Guidara, onetime co-owner of Eleven Madison Park and author of modern hospitality volume Unreasonable Hospitality, said in Bilt’s launch video. “Bilt just makes it easier to do these things with more consistency for more people.”
Chefs and restaurateurs get it, Bakhshandehpour told me. They may not understand the particularities of how, exactly, the technology works to connect the dots between disparate systems, but they do understand the end result: better service.
In other words, if you’re lauded restaurateur Danny Meyer in Bilt’s launch video: “To think that hospitality can be anything other than ‘one-size-fits-one’ is a big mistake.”
Bilt launched as a loyalty platform in 2019, but found its real niche a few years later when it launched a credit card — the Bilt Rewards Mastercard — that offered cardholders points in exchange for their biggest expense: rent. It evolved to a payment platform that covers a quarter of the U.S. “multifamily rental” market. (I pulled all these details from a great 2025 Fast Company story about Bilt that also uses the term “points-based economy” which I both love and loathe.)
It has tremendous reach. During our interview, Bakhshandehpour told me that 6 million rental residences are connected to Bilt; it’ll soon add 5 million mortgages. This cohort is forecasted to spend $20 billion “in the neighborhood,” he said — meaning Bilt knows a lot about people, including where they live and, roughly as determined by the size of their housing bill, the kind of restaurant they might frequent.
Here’s more about what I learned from our conversation last week, which you can listen to in full on The Simmer. And if you, like me, are still wondering where all the women went, Bakhshandehpour told me twice to “stay tuned” for more content from Bilt Hospitality, including product-specific videos.
“You’ll be the first to know,” he promised.
Bilt Hospitality operates on a commission structure.
We had to ask twice to get this answer: Bilt Hospitality makes money via commissions and, presumably, incremental diners who wouldn’t have otherwise visited a restaurant. Bakhshandehpour didn’t offer more details, but did promise relevance.
“We’re delivering the right guests to merchants,” he said. “We’re targeting exactly the right type of guest and customer that they want. That’s where this commission structure comes from.”
Its networks start with housing.
You don’t have to live in a Bilt building or even be a Bilt Mastercard holder to be a Bilt member. But it definitely helps.
“No one owns housing,” Bakhshandehpour said during our interview, a sentiment that, taken out of context, sounds strange. But what he means (I think!) is that housing — rents, landlords, owners, mortgages — is inherently disjointed. But if Bilt can attach itself to a household’s greatest expense
“To own the neighborhood, you need to own dining,” he said. “The dining experience defines your neighborhood.”
The restaurant-specific stuff is powered by an AI concierge.
On the diner side, members can ask for recommendations and take action. Bakhshandehpour recounted a recent experience: “I told the AI I have a lunch interview on this date. Find me a restaurant near the offices in [New York’s] Meatpacking that is quieter yet has a warm and inviting vibe so I can actually speak. It recommended Frenchette at the Whitney and it said, Oh, by the way, Frenchette is not a built restaurant partner. Here’s an OpenTable link for you to go make the reservation. I made the reservation, show up, table’s waiting.”
Restaurant operators can use the tech, too. “With the hit of a couple buttons, you can take care of 16 guests in five minutes,” Chicago restaurateur Kevin Boehm said on Bilt’s video.
It’s unclear exactly which “buttons” Boehm is talking about — but Bakhshandehpour explained: “From Kevin’s vantage point, he sits back and plays armchair hospitality — I think that was a phrase he actually used when we hung out. He can say, ‘Who are my key people coming in tonight? Oh, Kristen and Brandon are coming in. Awesome. Make sure that Chef touches the table and that we send them dessert from me. And here’s the note, I would like it to say, Why did you give me such a hard time on your podcast?1’ Boom. Now for Kevin to have done that previously, he would have to call or text the GM, relay that. Then they would have to relay that to the manager on the floor. Somewhere along the line, the odds are high that the manual process would break.”
🎧 Listen to our full interview on The Simmer:
Me?! Never.