BOKU decloaks, reveals global mobile payment network

Mobile payments company BOKU today stood up and announced its presence with style, after spending the last 5 months in what it called “stealth mode”. And by “with style”, I mean that it bought out two other mobile payment companies and announced $13 million in Series A funding from three investors. The company aims to become the standard for mobile payments - and is operational in 50 different countries at launch.

The companies bought out by BOKU were competitors Paymo and Mobillcash. These companies had existing deals and partnerships with carriers all over Europe, the US, Africa and Asia. So BOKU can start offering it’s payment services globally, immediately. The investments came mainly from Benchmark Capital, with some support from Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures.

So what does BOKU do? It basically offers a simple, PayPal style payment system that operates over mobile. Check out this video from its blog:

Via TechCrunch

From the BOKU blog:

“The simpler the value proposition, the more crowded a market can become as companies shift to strike while it’s hot. But, to execute on a standard you need bank-grade payments infrastructure and a skilled operational team. To that end, we’ve acquired the Paymo and Mobillcash businesses, teams and technologies. We’re currently working on integration and extending this platform to become an easy, fast and safe way to pay online using your mobile phone. Stay tuned for more announcements here.”

What we think?

This looks great - one of the major barriers to mobile merchants has been the amount of people who bail out of a transaction once they’re asked for a credit card number, or to perform some complex on-line verification process. This service works via good old familiar, reliable SMS.