PlaySpan

Last updated
PlaySpan
Type Private
Industry Payments
Founded2006
FateAcquired by Visa Inc.
Headquarters,
USA
Area served
Worldwide
ProductsUltimatePay
Parent Visa, Inc.

PlaySpan is a payments company whose payments platform handles transactions for digital goods in online games, digital media, and social networks.

Company history

PlaySpan was founded in 2006 by Karl Mehta. In July 2008, PlaySpan acquired Internet Payment Solutions, an alternative payments company, [1] and in April 2009, PlaySpan acquired Spare Change Payments, a social media payments company. [2]

The company received a total of $46 million in funding from investors Easton Capital, Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank Capital, STIC Investments, Softbank, Vodafone, and GE Asset Management.

In March 2011, Visa Inc. acquired PlaySpan for $190 million in cash + earn-outs over 2 years, amounting to approximately $240 million in total purchase consideration. [3]

Related Research Articles

Dotdash Digital media company based in New York City

Dotdash is an American digital media company that publishes articles and videos about various subjects across categories including health, home, food, finance, tech, beauty, lifestyle, travel and education. It operates brands including Verywell, Investopedia, The Balance, Byrdie, MyDomaine, Brides, The Spruce, Simply Recipes, Serious Eats, Liquor.com, Lifewire, TripSavvy, TreeHugger, and ThoughtCo. The digital media company competes with other online resource sites. In August 2012, Dotdash became a property of IAC, owner of Ask.com and numerous other online brands, and its revenue is generated by advertising. Dotdash has offices in New York, Chicago and Edmonton.

Capital One Bank holding company headquartered in McLean, Virginia

Capital One Financial Corporation is an American bank holding company specializing in credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings accounts, headquartered in McLean, Virginia with operations primarily in the United States. It is on the list of largest banks in the United States and has developed a reputation for being a technology-focused bank.

First Data Corporation is a financial services company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The company's STAR Network provided nationwide domestic debit acceptance at more than 2 million retail POS, ATM, and Online outlets for nearly a third of all U.S. debit cards.

Authorize.Net

Authorize.Net is a United States-based payment gateway service provider, allowing merchants to accept credit card and electronic check payments through their website and over an Internet Protocol (IP) connection. Founded in 1996, Authorize.Net is now a subsidiary of Visa Inc. Its service permits customers to enter credit card and shipping information directly onto a web page, in contrast to some alternatives that require the customer to sign up for a payment service before performing a transaction.

Xero (company) Accounting software company

Xero is a New Zealand–domiciled public technology company, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. Xero is a cloud-based accounting software platform for small- and medium-sized businesses. The company has three offices in New Zealand, six offices in Australia, three offices in the United Kingdom, three offices in the United States, as well as offices in Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Africa.

Block, Inc. is an American financial services and digital payments company based in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey and launched its first platform in 2010. It has been traded as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange since November 2015 with the ticker symbol SQ.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform, created by Ryan Holmes in 2008. The system's user interface takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.

InternetCash.com was a company that generated pre-paid cards, either in physical or electronic form, to distribute cash. The cash consisted of an InternetCash number together with a customer-selected PIN. The InternetCash e-currency could then be spent with participating online merchants. An early name for InternetCash, before it acquired the internetcash.com domain name, was SpendCash.com.

Kabbage, Inc. is an online financial technology company based in Atlanta, Georgia. The company provides funding directly to small businesses and consumers through an automated lending platform.

Similarweb Provider of website rankings and analytics

Similarweb is a digital intelligence provider for enterprise and small to mid-sized business (SMB) customers. The platform provides web analytics services and offers its users information on their clients' and competitors' web traffic and performance.

Spare Change Payments was an online payments company specifically designed for conducting micro-payments inside games and applications on Facebook and other social networking sites. It is now owned by Visa, Inc.

Stripe (company) Irish/American payment technology company

Stripe is an Irish-American financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in San Francisco, United States and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment processing software and application programming interfaces (APIs) for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.

9flats is an online marketplace enabling people to lease or rent short-term lodging. The company does not own any lodging; it is merely a broker and receives commissions from both guests and hosts in conjunction with every booking.

Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase operates remote-first, and lacks an official physical headquarters. The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, and as of March 2021 was the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States by trading volume.

Freecharge Indian financial services company

Freecharge is an Indian financial services company based in Gurgaon. It allows users to pay bills such as electricity, gas and telephone, as well as recharge mobile, broadband, DTH and metro cards. In addition, it enables the users to invest in mutual funds and get credit through Freecharge EMI.

Baseline Ventures is a venture capital investment firm that focuses on seed and growth-stage investments in technology companies. The company was the first seed investor in Instagram, an early investor of Twitter and has been called "one of Silicon Valley's most successful--and smallest--investment firms" by Forbes. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle's mobile payment platform, Circle Pay, allows users to hold, send, and receive traditional fiat currencies. In September 2015, Circle received the first BitLicense issued from the New York State Department of Financial Services. In April 2016, the British government approved the first virtual currency licensure to Circle. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.

Carta Worldwide Software company in Canada

Carta Worldwide is a Canadian financial technology company that offers digital payments technology and modern card issuer processing for banks and financial technology "fintech" companies. In addition to their Canadian headquarters in Toronto, Carta has offices in London and Casablanca. Carta operates internationally, providing financial technology and digital payment software and cloud API issuer processing.

Oxigen Services is an Indian fintech company. It is involved in micropayment of services and remittances in real time.

PayU Fintech company that provides payment solutions to online merchants.

PayU is a fintech company that provides payment technology to online merchants. The company was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Hoofddorp, Netherlands. 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 own a stake in one of its sister company, Tencent.

References

  1. "PlaySpan acquires PayByCash" . Retrieved 6 July 2013.
  2. "PlaySpan acquires Spare Change" . Retrieved 21 April 2009.
  3. "Visa to buy PlaySpan for $190 million". Reuters. 9 February 2011.