Building GyftGram's Contactless Gift Card Platform with Apple Pay

The Client

GyftGram is a Techstars 2024 company building a contactless digital gift card platform for the hospitality sector. Founded by CEO Kevin Malley, the startup saw an opportunity to modernize how restaurants, hotels, and entertainment venues handle gift card sales and redemptions using modern digital payment technology.

The hospitality industry has been slow to adopt contactless payment innovation for gift cards. Most venues still sell physical plastic cards that customers carry in wallets, lose, or forget to use. GyftGram aimed to create a seamless digital experience: customers could purchase digital gift cards instantly via mobile, venues could manage gift card programs through a simple dashboard, and redemptions would happen contactlessly using modern payment technology like Apple Pay.

The Challenge

GyftGram faced the classic Techstars challenge: intense pressure to build and ship quickly during a compressed accelerator timeline while getting payment infrastructure right the first time. Payment integrations are notoriously complex—one mistake in handling transactions, refunds, or security can create legal and financial liability. The company needed Apple Pay integration specifically, as contactless payments were core to their value proposition.

The hospitality sector adds additional complexity. Restaurants and hotels operate on thin margins and can’t afford payment processing failures or fraud. The founding team had strong hospitality industry expertise but needed hands-on technical execution. Time was the constraint—every week spent on technical obstacles was a week not spent on customer development or fundraising preparation.

Our Solution

We built GyftGram’s core platform over a four-month engagement covering their Techstars program and immediate post-accelerator period. The highest-impact work was implementing Apple Pay integration for digital gift cards—building the complete flow from purchase through secure payment processing to contactless redemption at venues.

Beyond payments, we developed venue management dashboards and customer-facing interfaces for purchasing and managing digital gift cards. We also guided technology stack choices, security best practices, and scalability considerations to ensure the platform was built on solid foundations.

The Impact

The Apple Pay integration became a core product differentiator—few competitors in the hospitality gift card space had implemented true contactless payment redemption. Delivering the platform on the compressed Techstars timeline freed up the founding team to focus on business development, customer acquisition, and fundraising.

As CEO Kevin Malley put it: “His talent as a remarkable software developer enabled us to take our platform to a level that would take most dev shops months to complete.”