Fit Pay, a wearable payments startup founder by former Visa and CyberSource executives, has raised $3.1 million in a seed funding round led by Germany's Giesecke & Devrient.
The San Francisco-based startup, founded by former Jumio and CyberSource exec Michael Orlando and one-time Visa chief technical architect Scott Stevelinck, has developed a service that allows wearable device manufacturers to seamlessly add contactless payment capabilities to their products. The firm's Trusted Payment Manager platform uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, combined with card network tokenisation to interact with point-of-sale terminals at retail locations
Scott Marquardt, president, Giesecke & Devrient America, Inc. says: “The Fit Pay platform, in combination with G&D’s capabilities in embedded secure operating systems, applications and credentials lifecycle management, brings a complete end-to-end portfolio to Fit Pay’s prospective wearable device partners.”
Fit Pay completed San Francisco-based Plug and Play Tech Center’s FinTech Accelerator Program last autumn. Plug and Play participated in this seed-funding round as well. In December, the company was selected from among hundreds of participants as the winner of the Comerica Bank and RocketSpace $50,000 Wearable FinTech Startup Challenge.
Fit Pay says it will launch a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign next week to support the commercialisation of a payment smartstrap the company has developed for the Pebble Time family of smartwatches. The new payment smartstrap, called Pagaré, enables Pebble Time users to make secure, contactless payments at millions of retail locations.