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Claim makes every purchase visible to friends and earns cashback perks – turning social discovery into a retention engine. $6M raised.
ENTRY ANGLES
Platform for honest advertising where users earn by recommending genuine products · College/university-based social network on-ramp targeting youth demographics · Social network mechanics integrated into existing platforms (feed, recommendations, rewards)
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Social network growth and user acquisition at scale, Monetization through advertising partnerships and affiliate mechanisms, Community moderation and trust/authenticity verification systems
Claim is a new social network built around the idea of sharing perks with friends. Members earn those perks by purchasing through the Claim app.
By default, every member's purchases are visible to their friends (unless they choose to hide them). That social layer lets people discover what friends are actually buying – new products, brands, stores, and places they might not have found otherwise.
Every purchase through the app earns the buyer cashback and perks. A perk might be a free coffee, a free pastry, a free class, or a discount at a specific store or on a specific brand's product.
Claim's key mechanic: perks aren't just redeemable – they're shareable. Members can gift perks to friends or trade them. The exchange opens doors: grab a free pastry at a restaurant your friend has already tried, using the perk they picked up there.
This gifting and trading mechanic is how businesses on the platform acquire new customers. Additionally, businesses can inject a set number of perks into the social feed each week – perks that any member can claim, then use, gift, or trade.
Businesses pay only when a perk is actually redeemed – regardless of whether the person redeeming it was the original recipient or a friend who received it as a gift or trade.
There are likely some guardrails on the weekly drops – for instance, a business may be limited to dropping no more perks than were redeemed the previous week, to keep perceived value from deflating.
The business target: offline and online restaurants, cafes, and retail stores. Brands already on the platform range from PepsiCo down to small local coffee shops.
Claim's target member: Gen Z. The go-to-market strategy mirrors how Facebook originally grew – starting at colleges and universities. Claim launched in Boston, with a broader rollout planned for next spring.
In the schools where it has launched, Claim reports 50% of students are using the app. Total membership is currently around 10,000.
The app launched in January. Since then, over $1 million in perks has been redeemed on the platform. The return on ad spend for businesses through the perk system has been 4.8x – nearly five dollars earned for every dollar given away. Each perk drop converts roughly half its perks into a purchase or venue visit.
Claim just raised $4M in new funding and disclosed a previously unannounced $2M pre-launch round – total raised: $6M.
Claim's founders argue their model works because existing advertising mechanisms are "seriously broken."
On one side: people want privacy. They don't want to be targeted by ads based on their browsing history – what sites they visit, what content they consume, what they search for.
On the other side: they want to discover new things. But if no one is showing them anything, how does discovery happen?
Claim's mechanic resolves that tension. No one is covertly tracking anything. Each member knows exactly which purchases are visible to their friends. Discovery happens through people's actual behavior, not through paid placements masquerading as recommendations.
This approach resonates particularly with Gen Z, who place a premium on authenticity. They're skeptical of ads in general and especially skeptical of brand-sponsored social posts. The implicit question is always: did you actually try this? Did you personally like it – or did someone pay you to say so?
A related question Claim has to answer: what happens when someone buys through the app, earns a perk, but didn't actually enjoy the product? Presumably they can hide that perk so friends don't see it as an endorsement. It's a nuance the platform will need to handle gracefully.
Claim is squarely in the honest advertising trend explored in a [related review](/review/chestnaja-reklama-bolshaja-glupost-ili-bolshaja-cel) from the day before – alongside The Desire Company (which raised $19.4M), Lava ([covered here](/review/iskrennjaja-reklama-luchshe-prodajot) when it was called Zipr, recently raised $725K), Hummingbirds ([covered here](/review/sarafannoe-radio-vmesto-reklamy), raised $4.4M), and Stack Influence ([covered here](/review/malenkij-pokupatel-luchshe-chem-bolshoj-bloger), raised $1.27M).
What all of these share – including Claim – is that they cut large-follower influencers out of the loop entirely. For local offline businesses, big influencers rarely make sense anyway – their audience is spread far beyond any single location. Why pay for all that irrelevant reach?
For everyone else, small creators represent a massively underutilized advertising channel with far lower cost per impression than celebrity influencers. There are 63.3 million nano- and micro-influencers in existence, versus roughly 34,300 accounts with audiences above 1 million. The math is compelling. But working with small creators at scale requires platform infrastructure that handles the logistics – discovery, outreach, coordination. No individual brand can manage that efficiently on their own.
The broad direction: platforms for honest advertising that let people earn by recommending things they genuinely like. The mechanics can take many forms; any of the startups discussed here are worth studying as models.
Claim's model carries the most risk. It's betting on becoming a new social network – and social networks are winner-take-most. Either they reach critical mass and become a default, or they eventually fade when existing platforms absorb the same mechanics.
But risk and return track together. Lower risk means lower upside; higher risk means a chance at a remarkable outcome – or nothing. Claim's model is only for people with serious ambition and the appetite to match.
That said, incumbent social platforms have lost their grip on younger demographics. The share of teens using Facebook was 71% in 2014–2015; by 2022 it had fallen to 32%.
Into that gap, multiple youth-focused social networks have raised real money – including some that use the same college-and-university on-ramp as Claim.
Fizz ([covered here](/review/sekret-zavtrashnego-uspeha)) lets universities and colleges create their own private social networks. It raised $41.5M, most of it after that review.
Saturn ([covered here](/review/sledujushhij-fejsbuk)), which raised $44M in its first round, is building an offline social layer for students anchored around shared class schedules.