Claim passes some of a brand’s ad budget onto consumers, giving them money to redeem each week.
The CEO told me he wants to eat into the ad dollars brands spend at Big Tech companies like Meta.
He said Claim targets Gen Z and urges users to get out into the world.
Last weekend, my roommate begged me to download a new app, Claim, which gives you money to spend at popular restaurants. She promised it wasn’t a scam — and showed me the Venmo payments to prove it.
I was skeptical, so I investigated.
Claim seems pretty simple: link your credit or debit card and get presented with potential rewards at participating brands — $8 off at Sweetgreen, for example, or $10 off at Chipotle. Then, select your reward, make a purchase, and get paid back the allocated amount via Venmo. There’s a “Drop” every Thursday when you choose a new reward from personalized options.
The morning after joining, I went to the Starbucks beneath Business Insider’s New York office to test whether my $10 claim would work. A few hours after paying with my linked card, I got a Venmo notification: “Claim paid you to shop at Starbucks.”
But I still had questions. Was I about to have my credit card data stolen? Does Starbucks now know even more about me and my coffee order? I decided to talk to Sam Obletz, CEO and cofounder of Claim, to find out what the deal was.
Obletz, 33, started Claim with Tap Stephenson, his college roommate, when the two were at Harvard Business School. They launched in Harvard Square in early 2023. The app started at colleges but expanded to 10 US cities in early February.
With Claim, brands pass their marketing budgets to consumers instead of paying for an ad, Obletz said. It’s potentially a huge market: according to EMARKETER, a sister company to BI, digital advertising spending in the US surpassed $300 billion in 2024.
Obletz says Claim can help brands that struggle to understand if their ad dollars are having a tangible impact. But he said Claim needs to expand to make a dent in the digital advertising world.
“We need to be large enough at scale to eventually take on the budgets that are currently being deployed at Meta and TikTok,” he said.
Claim’s job is to get users to try new restaurants they might like based on prior spending, with the hopes of turning them into loyal customers, Obletz said. Though Obletz said the app is often compared to loyalty programs, he described it as a “customer acquisition and retention tool.”
Claim currently partners with just under 50 companies, primarily in the food and beverage industry. Obletz said the app passes 80% of money to the consumer and keeps 20%. If a user doesn’t redeem their “Drop,” he doesn’t get paid.
