PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Joins Group Payments Startup WePay

Jason Kincaid

Jason Kincaid worked as a writer for TechCrunch from April 2008 through 2012. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaid@gmail.com → Learn More

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

WePay, a startup that’s meant to help take the pain out of managing payments for groups like fraternities and soccer teams, has landed a big new hire: Rasmus Lerdorf, the man who originally created the programming language PHP. Lerdorf, who left Yahoo last November, will be leading development of WePay’s API.  The API will begin rolling out to a small number of developers this summer (you can ask to take part by emailing API@wepay.com ).

WePay’s platform is built to facilitate payments in group situations, where you often have to collect money from multiple people (as opposed to systems like PayPal where 1-to-1 transactions are more common). Founder Bill Clerico says that so far the service has gotten a lot of traction with fraternities, and is also catching on with roommates who regularly have to share bills. Since launching a month ago, Clerico says that the volume of transactions has been growing 50% each week.

WePay also recently launched a ticketing feature, which Clerico says is less formal than sites like Eventbrite. He says that the feature could be used by fraternities to sell tickets to their parties, or for clubs to sell tickets to special events.

WePay has a strong roster of investors, including Y Combinator, Max Levchin, Dave McClure, Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway, Mark Goines, Andrew McCollum, Joe Campanelli, and Angus Davis.

Company: WePay
Website: wepay.com
Launch Date: 2008
Funding: $19.2M

WePay is an online payments platform for small businesses in the United States. WePay helps service providers send invoices, charge customer’s credit cards, and accept payments on their website. WePay also provides an API that allows developers to access its payments platform. Unlike competitors, WePay allows users to keep their money in a dedicated FDIC-insured Account. The service is great for service providers. WePay was founded by Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman in Boston in 2008. The company is...

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Person: Rasmus Lerdorf
Website: lerdorf.com
Companies: Yahoo!, IBM, Linuxcare

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995 and has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. He was most recently an engineer at Yahoo!, where worked from 2002 to Nov. 2009. Prior to his work at Yahoo!, Rasmus worked at LinuxCare, IBM, and Bell Globis. Rasmus was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the...

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