Payment Startup WePay has received $15 million in series C funding.
The new round of funding is headed by former Discover co-founder and Morgan Stanley CEO Phil Purcell, who is now the head of Continental Investors. Other investors include Max Levchin (founder & former CTO of PayPal), Yahoo! Chairman Maynard Webb (through the WIN Investment Network) and Angel investor Raymond Tonsing. Along with initial seed funding from Y-Combinator, WePay has raised over $35 million in investments.
The startup which originally started as a social group payment platform has slightly pivoted away from their initial idea and has become a more common and simple payment platform. In 2012, WePay launched their API, and since offer support for event registration, ticketing, custom invoicing, donations, mobile transactions, and Ecommerce.
"We are thrilled to welcome Continental to the WePay family. The team's depth of operating and investment experience with later stage companies, Payments , financial services and the public markets will be invaluable to WePay as we grow," said Bill Clerico, CEO of WePay.
According to WePay CEO, the business focused has mainly shifted towards 2 products, the API and their Veda social risk engine.
The Veda social risk engine is an innovative merchant risk assessment tool, verifying potential merchants via social networks. The engine takes results from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp. Pairing the results with Veda's proprietary algorithms can calculate the merchant’s social signals creating an accurate risk score. The Veda engine only requires 5 pieces of information as opposed to the standard 21 requested from other payment providers. The first name, last name, name of business, email address, and phone number is what is requested and a merchant can be approved within minutes.
WePay’s focus shift towards their API and risk engine has proven successful, with 600% revenue growth in the last year.
Payment startups showed great promise throughout 2013 and garnered over $1.2 billion in investments.
