In late September eBay announced their acquisition of Braintree, a payment service provider and gateway focusing on payments within mobile apps and websites. eBay is purchasing Braintree for $800 million in cash and the deal is expected to close before the end of 2013.
Braintree will continue to operate as a separate service, but now under eBay’s PayPal payments business with Braintree’s CEO reporting to PayPal’s president. Founded in 2007 Braintree has since raised nearly $70 million in private equity funding and has grown to process over $12 billion in payments annually, of which one-third is on mobile. Some of Braintree’s clients include Airbnb and LivingSocial, while the company has even made an acquisition itself purchasing Venmo for $26 million in 2012.
Venmo is a mobile P2P transfer company that enables people to send and receive payments via text message. It was reported that Venmo was one of the key parts attracting PayPal’s interest in Braintree, who was in talks with both PayPal and Square about a possible acquisition. PayPal has made several investments to further build out their mobile payments initiatives including the acquisition of mobile based payment method Zong for $240 million in 2011 and barcode scanning mobile app RedLaser for $10 million in 2010.
PayPal has already enjoyed tremendous growth via mobile payments in the past few years beating expectations and processing $14 billion in 2012, doubling the prediction of $7 billion, and following $4 billion in 2011. PayPal expects to hit $20 billion in global mobile payment processing for 2013 while Braintree and Venmo are now expected to contribute to their mobile payment capabilities as well.
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