Verizon invests in Flint Mobile expansion

Point-of-sale mobile payments solution Flint Mobile has raised another $9.4 million in funding led by new investor Verizon via its Verizon Ventures arm.

Flint Mobile, a solution originally built around snapping photos of your credit card instead of dongles or using other hardware to make payments is also expanding its service to the wider internet with a new service called Sell Online.

Earlier investors Digicel, Storm Ventures and True Ventures were also involved in the Series C funding round, as well as new investor Peninsula Ventures. This latest round take the total raised by Flint Mobile to just over $20 million.

A Techrunch report noted that while Flint CEO would not provide much detail on the reasons behind the Verizon investment, there is more to it than financial interest.

“They see our strategy to focus on mobility for business as interesting,” he said in an interview. “I can’t talk about their strategic thinking and I can’t disclose things that are not yet announced.”

Flint has merchant and business customers in the “high tens of thousands” with average transactions in the range of $120.

The absence of any kind of dongle set Flint apart when it launched in 2012, which has enticed independent business people like fitness trainers and accountants who want to minimise the amount of equipment they take with them but still take on-the-spot payments.

But the company had started to hear requests from customers who needed to bill in advance and send invoices, which led them to integrate with services like Intuit’s QuickBooks to expand the product, and become one of the first companies to integrate Apple’s Passbook into a loyalty couponing service. The company is also looking at Apple Pay, Techcrunch reported.

Sell Online, which lets Flint businesses add a payment option straight into their websites, stems from requests from customers who want to offer basic payments from their sites that integrate with the rest of what they are doing with Flint.

Sell Online is priced at the same rate as Flint’s mobile payments service — 1.95 per cent for debit card payments and 2.95 per cent for credit card transactions.

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