Company type | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Industry | Technology |
Founded | 2008 in Boston, Massachusetts |
Headquarters | Redwood City, California [1] |
Key people | Bill Clerico (Former CEO) [2] Richard Aberman (CSO) [2] |
Number of employees | 250–300 [3] |
Parent | JPMorgan Chase |
Website | go.wepay.com |
WePay is an online payment service provider based in the United States. It provides an integrated and customizable payment solution, through its APIs, to platform businesses such as crowdfunding sites, marketplaces and small business software companies. It also offers partners fraud and risk protection.
WePay was founded by Rich Aberman and Bill Clerico in 2008 in Boston, Massachusetts, and is now headquartered in Redwood City, California. [1] [4] The original inspiration for WePay occurred to Aberman when he had difficulty raising money for his brother's bachelor party. Aberman had to collect $4,200 from 14 friends spread across the United States to pay for bottle service at a club, rent at a Florida beach house, and food. Through a series of cash, checks, and PayPal money transfers, Aberman was eventually able to collect the money he needed. Aberman found the process very burdensome and believed that there should be an easier way to collect money from people. [5] After studying PayPal's weaknesses, Aberman asked Clerico to help him to solve this problem and create WePay. [6]
Aberman and Clerico were accepted by Y Combinator in California, which prompted Aberman and Clerico to move the company to the Silicon Valley. [7] On the West Coast, they received monetary support from Max Levchin, a cofounder of PayPal, and Ron Conway, an angel investor. [4] The company received $1.65 million from August Capital during initial fundraising efforts; by August 2010, it received an additional $7.5 million from Highland Capital Partners and August Capital. [8] By December 2010, WePay had raised $9 million in funding. [4] Other investors include Orlando Ramos, founder of Cyberpower Depot, Steve Chen, a cofounder of YouTube, and Eric Dunn, a former CTO of Intuit, [5] as well as entrepreneur Dave McClure. [9] In May 2011, founders Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman were named two of the Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs by Bloomberg Businessweek . [10] In 2014, WePay discontinued its donation service to focus on its other products. [11] In 2015, WePay raised a $40 million round from FTV Capital and the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten. According to Former CEO Bill Clerico, the purpose of this round was to accelerate WePay's efforts to expand its efforts to support payments in more countries internationally. [12] In October 2017, JPMorgan Chase announced that it would acquire WePay for a reported valuation of over $220 million. [13] [14]
WePay is a privately held company that offers payment capabilities to business platforms, making money through charging service fees when processing funds. WePay enables payments to platforms through its APIs.
WePay offers fraud and risk protection as a service through its proprietary risk prevention system and through several third party vendors. The company detects fraud by using a number of data sources, including social data connections as well as machine learning algorithms. [15] According to Aberman, "[WePay uses] your online identity to verify your identity in the real world." [16]
In early 2015, WePay opened its services to businesses in Canada. [17] In 2016, the payment facilitator also announced opening operations for businesses in the United Kingdom. [18]
In 2016, the Silicon Valley Business Journal shared that WePay is among its top 500 fastest growing privately held startups with over 1500% growth from the prior year. [19] In September 2011, the company employed 30 people. [20] Cofounder Clerico stated in an interview with Forbes contributor Elizabeth Woyke that billions of dollars are channeled through the company's services each week. [20] In October 2011, the number of WePay employees increased by 20%. [21] After its Series D round in 2015, the company said that it had over 100 employees, and had plans to grow to 200 in the next 18 months. [22] WePay now has over 180 employees located in California, Rhode Island, and the UK. WePay has also been recognized by multiple sources like PR Newswire as one of the best companies to work for in the Bay Area. [23]
As of 2015, WePay was used by over 1,000 businesses and nonprofits. [24] The company has worked with Apple Pay and Android Pay to enable customers to transact those forms of payment. [25]
The founders of WePay made an unexpected appearance at PayPal's 2010 developer conference in San Francisco, California. The stunt involved dropping a 600-pound block of ice filled with hundreds of dollar bills. The statement was that PayPal freezes your money and that better payment processors exist. [26]
In 2011, the company was used by many Occupy Wall Street supporters to donate money to the movement, which resulted in a surge of transactions. [27] Dominic Basulto of The Washington Post called WePay the " de facto official way" to give financial donations to the Occupy movement "while simultaneously bypassing the largest financial institutions". [28] By October 27, 2011, over 8,000 donors from 37 countries had donated $325,000 to the movement. [29] The donations are funneled through 300 Occupy-affiliated accounts, which are linked on Occupy Wall Street's website, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. [30]
WePay has supported fundraising efforts for hundreds of disaster relief campaigns and humanitarian causes through crowdfunding sites. Some of these campaigns relate to Hurricane Sandy, Earthquakes in Nepal, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the Orlando nightclub shooting and many more. However, WePay declined to process payments for over $24,000 in donations to legal cannabis growers affected by the October 2017 Northern California wildfires. [31]
The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers; it serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites and many other commercial users, for which it charges a fee.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is an American multinational finance company headquartered in New York City and incorporated in Delaware. It is the largest bank in the United States and the world's largest bank by market capitalization as of 2023. As the largest of Big Four banks, the firm is considered systemically important by the Financial Stability Board. Its size and scale have often led to enhanced regulatory oversight as well as the maintenance of an internal "Fortress Balance Sheet". The firm is temporarily headquartered at 383 Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and is set to move back across the street into the under-construction JPMorgan Chase Building at 270 Park Avenue in 2025.
Peter Andreas Thiel is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. As of July 2024, Thiel had an estimated net worth of $11.2 billion and was ranked 212th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin is a software engineer and businessman. In 1998, he co-founded the company that eventually became PayPal. Levchin made contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts and was the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA challenge response human test.
Alipay is a third-party mobile and online payment platform, established in Hangzhou, China in February 2004 by Alibaba Group and its founder Jack Ma. In 2015, Alipay moved its headquarters to Pudong, Shanghai, although its parent company Ant Financial remains Hangzhou-based.
Block, Inc., founded by Jack Dorsey in 2009, is an American technology company. It provides financial services to small and medium-sized businesses and consumers. Block has 4mn business clients and 56mn users, processing $228bn annually as of 2023. It leads the U.S. point-of-sale systems market for small businesses.
Braintree is a Chicago-based company that primarily deals in mobile and web payment systems for e-commerce companies. The company was acquired by PayPal on September 26, 2013.
Dwolla is a United States-only fintech company that provides businesses with a connection to the ACH Network or RTP Network.
Stripe, Inc. is an Irish-American multinational financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, United States and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment-processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
BitPay is a bitcoin payment service provider headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It was founded in May 2011 by Tony Gallippi and Stephen Pair. BitPay provides Bitcoin payment processing services for merchants.
Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.
This is a timeline of online money transfer and e-commerce service PayPal, owned by eBay from 2002 to 2015 and an independent company before and after that.
Stellar, or Stellar Lumens, is an open-source, decentralized protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delaware nonprofit corporation, the Stellar Development Foundation, though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.
Paytm is an Indian multinational financial technology company, that specializes in digital payments and financial services, based in Noida, India. Paytm was founded in 2010 by Vijay Shekhar Sharma under One97 Communications. The company offers mobile payment services to consumers and enables merchants to receive payments through QR code payment, Soundbox, Android-based-payment terminal, and online payment gateway. In partnership with financial institutions, Paytm also offers financial services such as microcredit and buy now, pay later to its consumers and merchants.
Venmo is an American mobile payment service founded in 2009 and owned by PayPal since 2013. Venmo is aimed at users who wish to split their bills. Account holders can transfer funds to others via a mobile phone app; both the sender and receiver must live in the United States. Venmo also operates as a small social network, as users can observe other users' public transactions with posts and emoticons. In 2021, the company handled $230 billion in transactions and generated $850 million in revenue. Users can view transactions on the Venmo website but cannot complete transactions on the website.
Zelle is a United States–based digital payments network run by a private financial services company owned by the banks Bank of America, Truist, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC Bank, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. The Zelle service enables individuals to electronically transfer money from their bank account to another registered user's bank account using a mobile device or the website of a participating banking institution. There is no fee or charge on the transaction.
VugaPay is a cross-platform payment service owned by Vuga Ltd, a Rwandan company. It allows businesses and users to transfer money across major payment systems, including credit card networks, mobile money and Bitcoin via an application programming interface, unstructured supplementary service data interface, a mobile phone app, or a web interface. It processed over 5 million transactions in 2016. As of December 2016, VugaPay offers instant payments to and from 40 different mobile money networks/carriers in Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Niger, Malawi, Congo Democratic Republic, Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia.
PayU is a Netherlands-based payment service provider to online merchants. The company was founded in 2002, and is headquartered in Hoofddorp. It allows online businesses to accept and process payments through payment methods that can be integrated with web and mobile applications. As of 2018, the service is available in 17 countries. The firm is owned by the Naspers Group, which also owns a stake in one of its sister companies, Tencent.
Affirm Holdings, Inc. is an American financial technology company founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin in 2012. It offers point-of-sale installment loans for shopping. Affirm tops the U.S. buy now, pay later sector, reporting nearly 18.7mn users and $26.6bn in annual gross merchandise volume, as of 2024.