CRM Bônus: turning loyalty rewards into a $1B-valued retail infrastructure
Key points
Key takeaways from NEXT 25 talk by CRM Bônus founder and CEO Alexandre Zolko (October 2026):
The journey. CRM Bônus is Zolko's eighth company; he built and lost almost 100 stores of his Maxus women's footwear franchise before pivoting, and he credits the failure of past ventures to a lack of focus.
Origin. The company was born in December 2017 to fix a retail pain inside his family's chain: loyalty rewards were being issued to customers' CPFs but never communicated, so almost nobody redeemed them.
The giftback model. Switching the trigger from CPF to phone number + SMS PIN let stores prove they had told the customer — engagement with the bonus went from around 10% to 75% within 90 days, and 20% of recipients return to spend three to five times the bonus value.
Retail results. The chain's stores grew monthly revenue from roughly R$200,000 to R$260,000 in three months; Zolko now guarantees a 10-20% sales and profit lift in 100 days or the client's money back.
Vale Bônus. A second line of business, Vale Bônus, is a printed reward currency brands accept as acquisition spend — Adidas, Renner, Marisa and Natura fund the burn as customer acquisition cost, which Zolko calls loyalty without burn for his company.
Data. Today CRM Bônus holds data on 122 million people in Brazil, matching name, phone and CPF, which lets it sell into enterprise programmes like Mastercard's push away from Pix toward debit.
Funding history. A bootstrap company that paid dividends from month 4, CRM Bônus raised R$280 million at a R$1 billion valuation in October 2021 (SoftBank, Riverwood, Iguatemi, Valor) and R$500 million in a May 2024 Series B led by Bond Capital; iFood announced a deal with CRM Bônus in 2026, announced roughly 4 months before this talk.
Lessons. Zolko's advice to founders: entrepreneurship is not a side business, focus is everything, and founders should wake up paranoid that they might break — a humility he says keeps even giants alert to competition.
Read more: YouTube — InvestidoresVC
