St. Louis Mobile Payment Firm OPER Lands Decent Funding Round

Admittedly, the cash raised by St. Louis startup firm OPER won’t win any world records, but this mobile payments and rewards operation had a sufficiently noteworthy presence to net it $750,000 in startup money in a recent funding round.

It’s enough to give the company a start, and it’s going to have quite a fight on its hands in the face of a market packed full of alternatives.

Leading the way was Serra Ventures, a company devoted to offering funding to startup firms focused on the Midwest.

Serra offered OPER $250,000 up front, with the remaining half-million to follow over the rest of the year.

That’s a great start, but not exactly what OPER is looking for, as reports note CEO and co-founder David Laiderman is out to land a full $1.5 million, putting OPER at about half its goal thus far.

However, it’s worth noting that investors have so far put $2.5 million into the app so far.

Right now, OPER plans to expand into two new markets: Los Angeles, which makes plenty of sense, and Denver, which makes somewhat less sense.

Interestingly, OPER is actually an acronym standing for Order, Pay, Earn, Redeem, and incorporates rewards programs into its mobile payment operations.

With OPER, users who put it to work in restaurants actually get five percent back on purchases.

The app has already done reasonably well for itself in St. Louis, where it’s already yielded around $50,000 in sales and is set to yield over $1 million in total sales for St. Louis restaurants. It started with over 100 restaurants to its credit, and since then, that number has cleared 200.

It’s a novel thought, something which makes it fairly valuable even in a market glutted with competitors.

By offering a rewards program directly in the payment app itself, it’s made itself a little more valuable to the user. That’s a point that companies like Starbucks have already noticed, and giving the consumer a little extra value seldom goes unwelcome.

While it may not be enough to push it into wide use, it does seem to be working in a field that not many are working so far-restaurants alone-and by offering an unusual proposition, it may be able to break out a first-mover advantage of its own even in a field that’s been long since saturated.