Bilt will launch an AI-powered platform for small businesses, called Bilt Neighborhood OS, marking the company's first major expansion beyond the rent-rewards business it has built over the past five years. The company announced the move on Tuesday.

The platform is designed to help local businesses attract new customers, build loyalty, and grow — without competing on discounts. Bilt positions the offering as giving independent merchants the kind of customer-targeting capability that large chains already possess.

"We've spent the last five years building a network that connects millions of people to the businesses around them. What we're doing now is giving businesses of all sizes the tools to actually take advantage of that network," Ankur Jain, Bilt's founder and CEO, said in a statement to Inc.

How will Neighborhood OS work in practice?

The platform will integrate with the technology businesses already use rather than requiring new systems. Bilt described a full customer journey running through existing infrastructure.

"A neighborhood restaurant can identify prospective customers, launch a targeted offer to bring them in, recognize them when they visit, and automatically apply the appropriate benefit through its existing point-of-sale system," the company's release said.

In other words, a merchant keeps its current checkout hardware and software; Neighborhood OS supplies the intelligence layer that identifies nearby potential customers and converts them into repeat visitors.

Bilt framed the problem as one of proximity without access. "Think about a restaurant, coffee shop, you name it — that has thousands of potential customers living just a few blocks away but no real way to reach them," Jain told Inc. "That's a huge missed opportunity, whether you're running a single location or hundreds."

Who are Bilt's launch partners?

Bilt is partnering with a set of payments and commerce companies to bring the platform to merchants:

• Adyen
• Clover from Fiserv
• Shift4
• Verifone
• OpenTable
• Grubhub

The list spans card acquiring, point-of-sale hardware, restaurant reservation, and food delivery — the core stack a neighborhood food or retail business already relies on. Integrations will roll out in phases beginning in 2027, meaning merchants will see the platform appear gradually rather than all at once.

What does this mean for small businesses?

For Bilt, the strategy extends the value of its existing asset: a membership base built since the company's founding phase five years ago around rewards for rent payments. That audience, measured in the millions of connected people, becomes the demand side of the new platform.

For merchants, the pitch is access to tools previously available mainly to big chains with large marketing budgets and data teams. Karen Kerrigan, president and CEO of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, told Inc. that technology is democratizing scale.

The strategic logic is straightforward. A single-location business cannot build its own customer-data platform or loyalty analytics. A network that already connects millions of consumers to nearby businesses can supply that layer as a service, working through the point-of-sale systems merchants already operate.

Bilt has not disclosed pricing, merchant counts, or rollout sequencing beyond the 2027 phase start. The company also did not say which partner integrations will arrive first.

The move positions Bilt against a broader shift in local commerce, where payments processors and reservation platforms increasingly bundle marketing and loyalty features into their merchant offerings.

Neighborhood OS arrives in 2027.