Paydiant, a new Boston-based mobile payments startup, this morning announced that it closed a $7.6 million Series A round of funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners.
The company plans to formally launch later this year.
Paydiant was co-founded by Chris Gardner, Kevin Laracey and Joe Paratore, three serial entrepreneurs.
Laracey was formerly venture partner at Sigma Partners and co-founder and CEO of edocs, the online billing and payments company that was acquired by Siebel Systems (now part of Oracle) in 2005. Gardner also worked at edocs, where he served as VP of products and marketing, and went on to join premium SMS mobile payments provider m-Qube (acquired by Verisign in 2006) in the same capacity.
Most recently, Gardner was CMO at ExtendMedia, a digital media content delivery and commerce platform software company that was acquired by Cisco in 2010.
Joe Paratore was edocs’ VP of engineering and technical services – he also joined m-Qube and subsequently Verisign after its acquisition.
As mentioned, the startup plans to launch its mobile payments solution later this year, so we’ll have to wait until they do to see if and how they plan to bring something disruptive to the table.
Paydiant co-founder Chris Gardner in a statement said:
“Enabling consumers to use their phones to make everyday purchases is a huge market opportunity. We have assembled a team who understand both the business and technology issues that must be addressed to create new mobile payments offerings for broad adoption.”
We’ll be keeping our good eye on this one.