Business is booming at online payment startup Spreedly, and its website touts a major reason:
“We’d spent months setting up a PCI-compliant infrastructure, and when I found out about Spreedly, we just ditched the whole thing,” says OpenDining.net.
PCI refers to payment card industry compliance.
Reflecting its growth, Spreedly this week unveiled a new web site as well as a new business focus.
The Durham startup offers a way for businesses to store credit cards in a “vault” in the cloud. But that wasn’t the company’s focus upon launching in 2008.
CEO Justin Benson sat down with ExitEvent’s Joe Procopio, who featured Spreedly on his blog. Benson told Procopio that Spreedly started out offering businesses a way to manage recurring or subscription payments via a software-as-a-service offering.
The company now integrated with more than 45 payment gateways across 68 countries and worked on ways to help businesses manage payment card industry (PCI) compliance.
“Sensitive card data never touches your servers via our transparent redirect,” the company says. “Reduce your compliance scope and remove the cost of managing this internally.”
United States gateways alone include:
- Authorize.Net
- Balanced
- Beanstream
- Braintree
- CyberSource
- Dwolla
- Elavon
- First Data e4
- First Data Global Gateway
- JetPay
- Merchant e-Solutions
- Mercury
- NETbilling
- NMI
- Paymentech Orbital Gateway
- Payflow Pro
- Payment Express
- PayPal
- QuickBooks Merchant Services
- Quantum
- Samurai
- Stripe
- Test
- TransFirst
- TrustCommerce
- WorldPay
While the company experienced more than 100 percent growth each year, the initial customer base was small. And Spreedly noticed something else. Customers who were not interested in subscriptions or recurring payments were coming to Spreedly for the credit card vault part of the company’s cloud-based technology.
Called “Core,” this technology is the platform on which subscription payments are processed, working like a vault for Spreedly to store credit card information for its customers.
The way Benson saw things, Spreedly could continue on its current path. Or it could pivot and aim bigger.
“Every once in a while, a fortunate startup has the vision to pivot off a piece of their overall offering, turning that piece into its own product or, even better, its own platform,” Procopio wrote. “When this happens, a pivot goes from a desperation move to opportunistic land grab.
Benson told Procopio that recently raised $200,000 from an investor in one of Spreedly’s larger prospective customers. With the financing, Spreedly is making planning enhancements to its offering and a marketing push targeting anyone who works with payment gateways.
