Tag Braintree

Braintree Acquires Venmo, Plans to Conquer Mobile Ecommerce

Amina Elahi

Braintree, Chicago’s own leader in online payments, is acquiring New York City-based mobile payments company Venmo for $26 million. This news comes less than three weeks after Braintree announced it would more than triple the size of its Chicago office. Both companies are backed by Accel Partners.

Earlier this month, Braintree CEO Bill Ready told us mobile commerce was one of two macrotrends on the minds of anyone in the online payments space. Already, mobile comprises one quarter of the $4 billion in credit card transactions Braintree processes per year. With his company’s acquisition of Venmo, it seems Ready and his team are pushing to take the mobile shopping challenge head-on.

And how will they do it? By pairing their processing power with Venmo’s digital wallet. While Braintree facilitates credit card payments for everyone from Disqus to Belly, Venmo makes it easy to swap funds with friends using a smartphone, and it’s the marriage of these separate but compatible services that looks to be a winning combination.

“By combining forces, Braintree and Venmo can continue to make the mobile shopping experience better for both merchants and consumers,” Ready said. For example, existing Venmo users will soon be able to use their digital wallets to place payments with any of the thousands of online merchants who utilize Braintree to process transactions. Ready sees this acquisition as an opportunity to bolster his company’s mobile offerings, by keeping up with the growing practice of mobile shopping and giving developers and consumers “a different set of tools to thrive in a mobile world.”

Read more at Built In Chicago.

Braintree Adding 150 Jobs in Chicago, Focused on Being the Leader in Payments

Amina Elahi

Braintree, an online payments tech company that put its roots down in Chicago in 2007, just announced that it will add 150 jobs to their West Loop headquarters. Over the next two years or so, that office will triple in size–a change that would allow Braintree to take the lead in the payments space.

According to company CEO Bill Ready, there are two macrotrends ruling online payments today. The first is using a cloud-based infrastructure, which not only decreases the cost of starting up and maintaining a mobile or online business, it also gives devs the chance to build products instead of serving as maintenance people. “Payments is the last piece of major infrastructure that has not moved,” says Ready.

Mobile commerce–the growth of it, specifically–is the other trend on everyone’s tongues these days. With one in five ecommerce transactions taking place on a mobile device, the opportunity to capture inevitable growth in this space is huge. Today, Braintree processes nearly $1 billion in mobile volume annually.

Why is this so important? According to Ready, his company is trying to build something that would transform the mobile payments ecosystem. “Braintree’s goal is to build a payment platform that developers can easily build on top of, similar to what iOS did for mobile apps,” Ready says. “In payments today, there is still a confusing backend. We are building the tools that will allow developers to innovate on top of our payment platform.”

Read more at Built In Chicago.