CHICAGO—August 17, 2012 — Braintree (www.braintreepayments.com) the fastest growing payments platform for online and mobile commerce, announced today its acquisition of Venmo, a mobile and social payment application that makes it seamless for consumers to make and share payments with their mobile phones. The addition of Venmo’s digital wallet and person-to-person payment application extends Braintree’s payment platform to consumers for the first time. The Venmo mobile payment application will make it even easier for consumers to make purchases on their mobile device and allow Braintree to make it even easier for e-commerce companies to accept payments on mobile devices.
“The addition of Venmo to Braintree’s offering will make it even easier for developers at e-commerce and m-commerce companies to offer the most elegant, frictionless, mobile and social purchasing experiences,” said Bill Ready, CEO of Braintree. “More than 20% of e-commerce sessions are already coming from mobile devices and mobile purchasing experiences will define the next wave of e-commerce. Braintree and Venmo will provide a set of tools as important to the next 10 years of e-commerce as PayPal was to the last 10 years of e-commerce.”
According to Internet Retailer, consumers purchase $10 billion on their smartphones this year. Braintree is already handling $1 billion in mobile payments, representing 10% of all mobile commerce transactions. In addition, Braintree has stored over 30 million credit cards from consumers who’ve purchased at merchants using Braintree’s payment gateway and vault. Consumers who have stored their payment information at one of the thousands of online and mobile applications that use Braintree will soon be able to utilize the Venmo digital wallet to pay merchants in just one click. Braintree powers payments for innovative online and mobile merchants including Rovio/Angry Birds, Uber, Airbnb, HotelTonight and OpenTable.
“Our goal at Venmo is to build the best mobile payment experience for consumers,” said Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail, co-founders of Venmo. “We started with an app for paying friends, and now want to bring that experience to as many people as possible by enabling other developers to add Venmo payments inside their apps. Braintree makes it very easy to for developers to accept online and mobile payments, so working together with Braintree just makes sense.”
Braintree is reshaping the payments experience for ecommerce companies, startups, and developers by providing tools that make it easy to accept payments. The Venmo team will further expand their mobile payment application to now provide tools that make it easy for consumers to pay for any good or service on their mobile device, whether that’s one of their favorite merchants or one of their friends.
“The Venmo team understands how to build rave-worthy experiences for their users, which is exactly what we at Braintree aspire to do for our clients,” said Bill Ready. “I can’t imagine a better fit than Venmo to help us build the payment platform of the next decade.”
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About Braintree
Braintree, the web’s fastest growing payments platform, powers payments for innovative and high-growth mobile and online businesses. Braintree provides an easy-to-integrate API for developers while ensuring the merchants’ end users have a frictionless and secure experience at checkout. Braintree’s full-stack payments solution includes a payment gateway, merchant account, recurring billing, and credit card storage.
Braintree’s solution has been proven to scale and support many of the most discerning, high-growth companies on the web, including Rovio/Angry Birds, LivingSocial, 37signals, Airbnb, Fab.com, OpenTable, Uber, HotelTonight, Heroku and GitHub. Founded in 2007, Braintree is now processing more than $4 billion in annual credit card volume from thousands of merchants, nearly $1 billion in mobile payments, and its rapid growth earned it a spot on the 2011 Inc. 500 List as the nation’s 47th fastest-growing private company. Braintree was profitably bootstrapped for four years before accepting a $34 million investment from Accel Partners in 2011. Visit us at www.braintreepayments.com and on Twitter @braintree.
About Venmo
Venmo lets people make and share payments. The Venmo iPhone and Android apps connect your phone with your bank accounts, debit cards and credit cards, so you can instantly send money to anyone. When you receive money, you can withdraw it to your US bank account overnight.
People all over the United States use Venmo to pay friends for rent, dinner, drinks, movies, concerts, birthdays, ice cream, laughs, and anything else. To learn more about Venmo, visit venmo.com.
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