Braintree 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 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."