John Taylor Garner - Odynn

How John Garner Built a Company for a Problem the Market Hadn’t Noticed Yet

Apr 16, 2026

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes from being right about something before anyone else agrees with you. John Taylor Garner knows this well. In late 2021, he and his co-founders shut down their first company and pivoted to a new thesis: that airlines and hotels had quietly broken their loyalty programs during COVID, and that the credit card industry would soon face a churn crisis because of it. The only problem was that nobody had noticed yet.

For roughly two years, John built what would become Odynn in near-complete stealth, selling a solution to a problem that was still invisible to the banks he was pitching. “We were a little early,” he says, with the calm of someone who has since been proven right. “But it also took a while to build out all the tech, so it ultimately didn’t matter.”

That ability to stay the course on an unconfirmed thesis, without external validation to lean on, is the through-line of John’s story as a founder.

From the Trading Desk to the Builder’s Table

John spent six years at Merrill Lynch as a volatility trader, eventually running the International National Macro Cross-Asset Volatility book on the index desk with record profitability. The role covered currencies, commodities, fixed income, high yield, and emerging and developed markets simultaneously. He describes the appeal of it plainly: “It is impossible to fully manage everything. You’re always one step behind, which sounds annoying, but it was actually what made it engaging.”

That comfort with managed chaos would prove useful later. Trading floors are finite, though. Markets close. Founders are always on. The transition required a real adjustment, and John acknowledges it. He now frames his earlier career not as preparation for pressure, but as a different category of it entirely. A senior contact at a large bank recently told him he might be the only founder they had met who had taken a less stressful job by leaving trading. He paused when he heard it. “I hadn’t thought about that,” he admits. “That is a valid point.”

Before launching Odynn, John built Card Curator, a mobile super-app for credit card management that he describes as “a fully automated version of NerdWallet.” He began working on it at the end of 2018, and the early traction was strong enough to justify building it out fully. Then COVID arrived and gutted the travel category the product depended on. He went to Wharton for his MBA, continued working on Card Curator during that time, relaunched it in January 2021, and grew it to roughly 40,000 monthly active users. The team, by his own description, knew nothing about B2C marketing. They grew anyway, largely because the product resonated.

The end came when airlines and hotels shifted from static to dynamic loyalty pricing. The recommendation engine Card Curator had built became unreliable overnight. Rather than rebuild it, the team made a sharper call: go build the dynamic pricing infrastructure itself and sell it upstream to financial institutions.

That decision became Odynn.

The Problem That Took Two Years to Become Obvious

To understand what Odynn does, it helps to understand what happened to loyalty programs during the pandemic. Airlines and hotels, which generate the majority of their profits through loyalty programs rather than core operations, needed liquidity fast. The solution was to sell points and miles in bulk to their banking partners. Amex, Chase, Citi, Capital One and others bought billions of dollars worth of them to help keep travel suppliers solvent.

The result was predictable in hindsight. Flooding a market with currency while keeping its price pegged causes rapid inflation. When the peg eventually had to float, airlines and hotels shifted to dynamic pricing for redemptions. Points that once bought a predictable flight now bought an uncertain one. Most cardholders did not notice immediately, because most cardholders were not traveling.

By late 2023, that changed. The first visible signal was Delta’s October 2023 standoff with Amex over lounge access, status earning, and point payouts. Longtime Delta loyalists left for other carriers. The underlying cause was structural: Delta, like every major airline, had sold so many miles during COVID that it could no longer honor the old terms without going backward financially.

“It turns out we were right,” John says. “And it turns out churn is at all-time highs for these cards and only increasing.”

Odynn sits at the intersection of this problem and the financial institutions trying to solve it. The company builds travel portal infrastructure for card issuers, complete with embedded loyalty solutions that help cardholders understand what their points are actually worth in real time. Customers include banks and fintech platforms that want to offer a fully branded, modernized travel experience without building the underlying tech themselves. John describes the vision as “a Shopify for travel portals.”

The competitive landscape is remarkably concentrated. John names four major players in embedded travel: Expedia, Booking, Hopper and Arrivia. Between Expedia and Booking alone, more than 80% of the market is accounted for. Every one of those companies is valued in the billions. Odynn is the sixth.

The Investor Search in a Niche Within a Niche

Finding the right investors for a company this specialized required recalibrating what “relevant experience” even meant. John was direct about his criteria. Financial capital was the baseline. What he actually screened for was domain expertise.

“There are really only five major players,” he explains. “So if you’re taking a step back, there’s only a limited set of individuals that can really provide that insight for us.” A pure embedded travel background was nearly impossible to find in a VC. So the team expanded the filter to include loyalty experience, fintech experience, or adjacent travel verticals, and looked for any meaningful combination of those.

Bonfire Ventures led the round, with Fiat Ventures co-leading. Odynn raised $9.5 million in a seed round that was completed at the end of 2025 and announced in February 2026. John’s confidence in Bonfire came partly from watching their work with Wildfire, a portfolio company on the retail loyalty side. Fiat’s roots were in embedded fintech, which mapped directly onto what Odynn was building. “It’s kind of a perfect match,” John says.

His broader point to founders thinking about investor relationships is worth noting. He does not distinguish between financial and non-financial value as though one is primary. For him, a check without relevant knowledge attached to it is a diminished asset in a vertical this narrow.

Staying Grounded When the Market Hasn’t Caught Up

John runs a team of 28 people, 19 of whom are engineers. His co-founder and CTO Anuj Patel, who he met at Wharton, leads the technical side. John focuses on fundraising, investor relations, sales, go-to-market, and overall strategic direction. He also taught himself Python to build the core algorithm behind Card Curator and Odynn, and vibe-coded the company’s agentic AI travel concierge during the summer of 2025 because he had a specific vision for how it should work.

He is candid about what keeps him level during the harder stretches. Going for a run is his most reliable reset. “If I’m working on a problem and I can’t get over it, removing yourself and clearing your head a little bit, you’ll come back with new ideas or a new approach.” He travels extensively, often taking calls from beaches, ski mountains, or wherever he happens to be, because the flexibility of not being office-bound is something he protects deliberately. He also credits his wife, a PhD in clinical psychology, as what he calls his “secret sauce.” “I kind of have an in-house therapist,” he says. “Very few people can take advantage of that though.”

The motivation underneath all of it is structural. The loyalty industry has always wrestled with whether a loyalty program is a cost center or a revenue driver. John’s view is that it is always both, but only the companies that treat it as a long-term investment get the return. “Every dollar invested into a successful loyalty program should be paying between five and 10x back,” he says. “Not immediately. This is a multi-year long investment.”

The Roadmap Ahead

By mid-2026, Odynn expects to have transferable loyalty live, with select partners already lined up. Luxury hotel offerings comparable to Amex’s Fine Hotels & Resorts program are in the pipeline, along with the full rollout of car rentals. The agentic AI travel concierge, currently in beta with active customer testing, is expected to move to production before year end.

The most significant milestone on the horizon is a fully self-managed version of Odynn’s modular infrastructure. The current version is already live for customers in production. The self-managed release would allow clients to build their own travel portal independently, using modular SDKs, APIs, and model context protocol access so that large language models can handle the build process directly.

The company that John describes is one still assembling its final form. But the thesis it was built on, that cardholders would eventually notice their points were worth less than expected, that churn would follow, and that financial institutions would need better tools to respond, has held up. Being early, it turns out, was not the same as being wrong.