Philadelphia-born Venmo considered prize in Ebay's Braintree acquisition

Tom Paine

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Ebay announced today it was acquiring Chicago-based Braintree, a web and mobile payments processor, for $800 million in cash. It will become part of Ebay's PayPal unit.

Speculation about Braintree being a target has been heavy for a least a month. Much of the talk has focused on Venmo, the Philadelphia-born mobile payments startup that later moved to New York. Braintree's growth in mobile payments has been said to have been phenomenal paricularly since it acquired Venmo last year for $26.2 million; mobile payments now account for about one-third of Braintree's total payments processing of about $12 billion annually, PandoDaily reported recently. Venmo provides an easy to use tool to send payments via mobile; many are excited about the potential of its new Venmo Touch app.


Venmo's co-founders, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail, both attended Penn, where the two were originally randomly paired as freshman roommates. Venmo was founded in 2009; it received a round of funding led by Accel Partners in 2011 and relocated to New York.

See also PayPal’s David Marcus: Braintree Keeps Its Brand And Ops Intact; Venmo Will Be Used For Big P2P Push from TechCrunch.


Also this week, King of Prussia-based Ebay Enterprise (formerly GSI Commerce) made several
significant announcements at its Client Summit in New York.