BillFloat, payleven Land Nearly $30 Million in Funding (Jan. 21, 2013)
Jan. 21, 2013
A pair of payment startups have received cash infusions from investors totaling nearly $30 million. San Francisco-based BillFloat, which provides small-dollar loans to customers for electronic bill payments, landed $21 million from Investor Growth Capital (IGC), with participation from Bronze Investments and previous BillFoat investors Venrock, FirstRound Capital and Baseline Ventures. As part of the new funding round—which brings BillFloat’s total investment to $37 million since its 2009 founding—IGC Vice President Brian Mulvey and Bronze Managing Partner Stephen DeBerry will join BillFloat’s board of directors. The company, which received seed investment funding and tech support from PayPal, currently has 700,000 registered users, and plans to issue more than $400 million in customer credit by year’s end, with individual loans of up to $200.
Meanwhile, European startup payleven, the maker of an EMV-compatible mobile payments card reader, has received an investment in the “high single-digit USD million” range, mainly from an unnamed backer, the company says. payleven’s mobile reader is currently available in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, the U.K., Poland and Brazil, and the firm said it will use the new funding to expand service in those markets as well as entering new areas. payleven faces some stiff competition in the European mobile card reader arena, where startups including Munich’s payworks, U.K.-based mPowa, Stockholm’s iZettle and British mobile carrier O2, among others, are all angling for share in a market that is much more fragmented than that of the U.S., where early entrant Square remains largely dominant.
