The payments space is starting to settle down. The flow of seed funding has slowed, and a handful companies have separated from the pack, raising meaningful capital over the past year. Add Providence-based Swipely to that list. The payments processing and analytics play announced today that it has raised $12 million in new funding in a series B round led by Shasta Ventures, bringing the company’s total venture financing to $20.5 million.
Last year the startup moved away from its initial card-connected loyalty model to pursue a smart payment-processing and analytics strategy aimed at a number of larger, and mostly commoditized, legacy processing players. The three year-old company runs credit cards payments for small and medium-sized businesses, and then builds marketing and analytics services on top of Hands free access.
Swipely’s product plugs into the back-end of a merchant’s point of sale system like a traditional payment processor, but stores the transaction data (which would traditionally come in a paper statement weeks later) immediately to the cloud. There, the company can use the data to run a suite of ancillary services. That includes metrics to determine a business’s most valuable customers, the percentage of new versus returning customers, and more. It also folds in marketing services that allow businesses to sign up customers in card-connected loyalty programs and lead generation.
Since making its shift last year, the startup has been on a tear. Swipely has nearly tripled the total transactions it processed in all of last year, up from $250 million in 2012 to $700 million today. Today, the company’s platform is used in over 130 cities, and has processed over 2 million consumers.
Part of what has accelerated its growth is that the model asks little of merchants or consumers in terms of learning a new behavior – a pitfall that has limited some payments startups’ ability to grow: “If our merchants had to replace their point-of-sale system to adopt Swipely, they probably would not do it. They’re large businesses who depend on these systems to do a lot of things,” says Davis about the decision to take an open approach. “For the most part, the new-fangled iPad POS systems don’t compete at the upper end of the POS market today… If it’s not broken, there’s no need for them to fix it.”
The question now remaining for Swipely is whether staying out of the consumer experience (by creating a mobile payments app) and the merchant experience (through the point of sale device) will hurt its positioning down the road. As new entrants like Square push upstream with an integrated model (including merchant processing, consumer payments, and POS), and legacy players try to add similar services, Swipely could find its market share diminished. But it’s clear that for the time being the advantages of the open model (early scale and low-cost adoption) far exceed the long-term value of a closed approach.
In La La Land, the home of movie magic, we're used to our surroundings being not quite what they seem. But did you know, at this very moment, you are surrounded by thousands of tiny containers of various shapes and sizes, camouflaged in bushes, hidden in fake electrical boxes, attached by magnet to the bottoms of bar stools and perched atop stop-signs? You might need an ultra-violet light to discover the final clue to find them or wait for low tide to wade out to a cave at the beach, but they're there. That creepy guy at the bus stop who keeps looking around suspiciously might be totally nuts...or he might be a geocacher.
Geocaching is a worldwide treasure hunt that began in May 2000 when the U.S. government gave up "selective availability" and allowed civilians to use GPS devices with almost perfect accuracy for the first time. Computer consultant David Ulmer was one of many GPS enthusiasts brainstorming how this newly available technology could be used. The day after "selective availability" was lifted, Ulmer decided to hide a bucket in the woods near his home in Beavercreek, Oregon filled with prizes and post the coordinates online for anyone to find. He called it "The Great American GPS Stash Hunt" and its one rule was, "Take some stuff; leave some stuff."
Los Angeles has become a world hotspot for geocaching, partly because of our year-round mild climate, partially because of our tech savvy population and partially because of our varied and intriguing terrain. "Whatever geocaching experience you're looking for, you can find it in L.A.," claimed real estate broker and geocacher Andy Perkins in a phone interview. "On the same day, you can be digging for boxes at the beach, grab easy urban caches through the city, then head up to the mountains or out to the desert."
Perkins has been geocaching with his wife as Team Perks since they moved to the area over ten years ago and were looking for a fun way to explore. Together, they have hidden over a hundred cashes and geocached in forty two states. Their strategy is to hide caches in beautiful or interesting spots that searchers might not have seen before. "Our area has actually become saturated with caches. All the good spots are taken," says Perkins. "So when we go four-wheeling in our jeep or hiking to a scenic spot, we hide them out there. We have some out at Vasquez Rocks where they shot a lot of Star Trek."
Perkins and his wife are what geocacher Stephen O'Gara of Team Ventura Kids would call Green People. "I consider there to be three different groups of geocachers," says O'Gara by phone. "One is Green People who like to go hiking and do events like CITO (Cash In Trash Out) to clean up trails. Others focus on finding as many caches as they can. Then there's the techy group that's more into the programs and software." O'Gara, who began searching for geocaches with his friends on Harleys all over the southwest, admitted he fell in the second group. The Ventura Kids set a world record several years ago by finding 1,157 caches in 24 hours along the Extraterrestrial Highway in Nevada. The highway's claim to fame is not only that it passes Area 51 but also that is one of the largest geocache "power trails" in the world, with 2800 caches hidden every few hundred feet.
The treasure hunt continues once you've found the cache. If the container is small (some are smaller than a screw), it may only contain the log scroll for visitors to sign. But if it is larger, it may contain geocoins, trackables or other items visitors choose to leave behind. A geocoin is a collectible item that organizations and teams leave like a calling card. Trackables are dog tags with a unique number on them that are attached to items as small as a toy car or as large as a bowling pin. When you find a trackable, you look up the number online and see where in the world it's trying to get to. When you travel closer to its destination, you hide it in a geocache for another cacher to find.
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