Ebay’s PayPal has acquired Chicago-based payments gateway Braintree, in an all-cash deal worth $800 million. We had originally reported that Braintree was on the block, with Square and PayPal both in acquisition talks for the company.
Braintree — which had raised $69 million in outside funding from Accel, NEA, RRE, Greycroft and others — was founded in 2007. Braintree essentially powers and automates online payments for merchants and companies online. The company provides a merchant account, payment gateway, recurring billing, credit card storage, support for mobile and international payments, and PCI Compliance solutions. BrainTree has become a one-stop-shop for all the services a business needs to receive payments from anywhere in the world.
The processor is now seeing $10 billion in payments annually, the company reported in July. The service is used by a number of startups and tech companies, including Airbnb, Fab, LivingSocial, Uber, Twilio, GitHub and others.
In addition, Braintree operates Venmo, a mobile payments solution the company acquired last year for $26.2 million. We’re hearing that Venmo, which allows people to pay and send money to each other for free, was a key part of what attracted PayPal to the company, but it’s unclear yet how the technology will be integrated into PayPal’s core platform.
Though Braintree was an early mover in the online payments space, these days competition with other services like Stripe and Balanced has been making things tougher on the company.
We heard from sources that while acquisition talks with Square stalled, negotiations with PayPal have been taking place over the past month or so. We also heard Braintree was asking for a hefty $1 billion.
PayPal, which last acquired IronPearl in the Spring of this year, could take on Stripe in acquiring more of the online checkout with Braintree’s customers. It’s also a good way to bring in fresh talent to the organization, which is attempting to reinvigorate innovation and product development these days.
No comments:
Post a Comment