Paydiant, the provider of a cloud-based, white label mobile payment and offer redemption platform for retailers, banks and payment processors, today announced that it closed a $12 million round of funding led by Stage 1 Ventures. The Series B round also included existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners. Paydiant raised $7.6 million in February 2011. The new investment will be used to accelerate product development, sales and marketing. David Baum, Managing Director of Stage 1 Ventures, will join Paydiant's board of directors.

With Paydiant, banks and retailers can integrate complete mobile wallet capabilities into their own iPhone(R) and Android(TM) applications, and payment processors can enable contactless mobile payments and offer redemption on existing payment terminals and point-of-sale (POS) systems - without involving new intermediaries and without requiring new smartphones or POS hardware.

Paydiant enables retailers to accept mobile payments and offers using their existing point-of-sale infrastructure while allowing consumers to make payments, redeem offers, and receive e-receipts for purchases made online and in-store using mobile wallets installed on their existing iPhone and Android smartphones. In addition, the solution enables banks and retailers to avoid sharing sensitive customer information with intermediaries, and allows issuers of Paydiant-powered mobile wallets to share in new revenue streams from highly targeted mobile ads and offers. The Paydiant solution is currently deployed in several U.S. regions in partnership with prominent card-issuing banks, merchant processors, POS providers, retailers and restaurants. These rollouts will be expanding aggressively in the second half of 2012.

"Stage 1 Ventures has a number of investments in the retail offers and mobile offers arena," said David Baum, Managing Director at Stage 1 Ventures. "We believe that Paydiant's solution is unique in its ability to deliver integrated mobile payment, offer redemption, and e-receipts today, and have it work with the payment terminals and smartphones available both today and in the future. It's very well positioned."

"Consumers want to be able to pay with their mobile phones. It's a huge market opportunity but the most hyped approaches have some fundamental stumbling blocks," said Chris Gardner, co-founder of Paydiant. "One, they require merchants to upgrade their point-of-sale infrastructure at a huge cost. Two, they require retailers and banks to share an incredibly valuable asset - their customer transaction data. Paydiant gives retailers and banks control over this critical customer touch point and all the incremental revenue and customer loyalty opportunities that come with it. We believe this approach will accelerate the adoption of mobile payments and offer redemption and all the advantages they offer for consumers and retailers."

While other mobile payment solutions require consumers to buy new phones or retailers to invest in costly new payment terminals, Paydiant works with existing smartphones, POS systems, and payment terminals, including entry-level countertop devices. Paydiant provides an easy to implement application programming interface (API) that enables retailers, payment processors and banks to enable payment terminals, POS systems, online shopping carts, ATMs and other systems to be ready to accept mobile offer redemptions, contactless payments and cash access requests from Paydiant-enabled mobile wallets. As a result, retailers and banks can begin signing up consumers today for mobile payments, while having the peace of mind of knowing that Paydiant works with today's technologies - including multiple smartphone operating systems and smartphone-to-POS interfaces like 2D codes and NFC - as well as tomorrow's.

About Paydiant Paydiant is the provider of a cloud-based, white label mobile payment and offer redemption platform that enables merchants, banks, and payment processors to deploy and manage their own mobile payment, offer management and offer redemption solution, under their own brand and on their own terms. Based on an enterprise-class, cloud-based transaction processing platform, the Paydiant solution enables the key stakeholders in the payments value chain - retailers, banks, and payment processors - to control the next generation of payment solutions.