Clinkle Opens Waitlists To U.S. College Students, Teases A Bit More About What The $25M App Will Look Like

Clinkle, the much-hyped mobile payments startup that recently announced a $25 million round, announced today that it is opening its wait lists to college students across America.

The company, which has been in stealth mode since 2011, says the students that build the largest wait lists, proportional to their school’s student body size, “will be among the first to experience Clinkle on their campuses.”

Students who enter their university email address on the Clinkle website are taken to a page that teases a bit more about the Clinkle user experience, but still doesn’t divulge many details. Don’t worry, the email address doesn’t have to be valid, so you can go ahead and check it out using something like techcrunch@stanford.edu.

The most interesting reveal on the page shows details of how something called “Clinkle Cash” will work. In June, beta testers told me about their experiences using Clinkle Cash:

“The two say the setup process was quick and simple: entering bank account information, setting a security code, and adding other friends who had the app. Clinkle uses a separate bank inside the app, called “Clinkle cash.” Users could transfer money back and forth from their bank accounts into “Clinkle cash.” These Clinkle dollars were then used for peer-to-peer and peer to merchant transactions.”

The website today shows an interactive screen where you can play with Clinkle Cash, transferring dollars between a Clinkle money clip and a bank account; it works exactly as my sources explained, and looks very user friendly.

The company previously had college waitlist pages live for schools like Stanford and Yale, but took them down right before announcing the $25 million round. Those pages showed different product images and didn’t show how Clinkle dollars will work. A Clinkle spokesperson tells me that, at the time, not all schools had access, so the company took down the pages, added more of a sneak peek at the product, and relaunched them for all schools.

A wait list page for the general public has been live for a while now, but Clinkle will be rolling the product out to college students before the general public.

As sources told me in June, the company’s most pressing issue right now is actually getting the app out there:

“The former employee said he doesn’t know why they’ve taken so long to release the app, given that it works well in small beta groups, but assumes it’s related to the company’s growth strategy, not an engineering issue.

“They have the top engineers out of Stanford and they have a lot of them, and they’ve been working on it for a while,” he said.

“I think a lot of people at the company also have that same mentality,” the former employee said, regarding why it hasn’t launched yet.”

The text at the bottom of the college wait list page appropriately proclaims,“And you haven’t seen anything yet.”

A Clinkle representative said no one at the company, including CEO Lucas Duplan, would be made available for interviews.