Investors Flock to CardFlight For Seed Funding
CardFlight is definitely feeling good after a successful round of seed funding. The New York based company earned an impressive $1.6 million through FF VC, a venture capital firm that focuses on early stage tech startups.
In the same vein as Square and LevelUp, CardFlight is a payments solution provider specializing in in-person credit card transactions for mobile devices. CardFlight offers its clients its own magnetic stripe reader, a payment gateway service that allows access to almost any merchant account, and SDKs for both Android and iOS platforms that they feel are significantly simpler than most to integrate into customers’ applications.
Founded by CEO Derek Webster, CardFlight was created out of necessity. As Webster describes it in an interview, “CardFlight started when we were trying to build a mobile app that would use a magnetic stripe reader to read credit card data, and we quickly realized the existing options were very difficult to work with… Rather than just solve the problem for ourselves, we set to work building a solution that can help other app developers.”
While many of their current clients are conference and event based vendors, CardFlight can be used by just about anyone, and, in many ways, it’s already happening. Talking about his software, Webster states, “the great thing about CardFlight is that it can be integrated into virtually any app and allows our clients to tie payment data to their app’s other functionality such as CRM, inventory management, fulfillment, reporting and analytics… We have event management apps, medical practice management apps, CRM apps for field sales teams, freestanding donation kiosks, people building their own POS systems, and more.“
As for what CardFlight plans to do with the funding, Webster said, “This funding will allow us to grow our team, which enables us to add new features to our product and to integrate with even more credit card processors beyond the 23 different ones we already support.”
Any investors looking to get in on the action now are going to find themselves waiting in line. Talking about the success of the initial seed investment Webster said, “the round was oversubscribed, and we ended up having to turn some great investors away.”
And, as of now, there’s no telling how long you may be waiting, when asked about the next step, and whether or not CardFlight would be looking for more investors, Webster told us, “Right now our main focus is on execution and growing our business, and we can’t comment on any future investment at this time.”