Amazon has acquired San Francisco-based mobile commerce outfit GoPago, according to press reports, putting it in competition with the likes of Square and PayPal.
GoPago co-founder and CTO Vincenzo di Nicola has told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that a deal has been done with Amazon, which will use the start-up's technology as the base of "a new ambitious project".
In a Facebook post screen-capped on Quora, di Nicola revealed that he is not joining Amazon as part of the deal, which has yet to be confirmed by the e-commerce giant.
Founded in 2009, GoPago developed a smartphone application that allows consumers to browse, order, and pay for local goods and services before collecting them instore, skipping queues.
It later moved into the point-of-sale software and hardware market, taking on traditional players such as NCR as well the new generation led by Square.
Last February JPMorgan Chase invested an undisclosed sum in GoPago.
According to an anonymous Quora post, the funding was $25 million but efforts to sell the POS technology through Chase Paymentech allegedly failed and the company ran out of money.
Like its fellow tech giants Google and Facebook, Amazon has been struggling to figure out a way to crack the lucrative payments market. It recently took on PayPal with a service that lets online shoppers use their log-in details to make purchases on other e-commerce sites.