Square Closes That $100 Million Round, Mary Meeker Joins Board

Erick Schonfeld

Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

It’s official. Jack Dorsey’s Square has joined the billion dollar valuation club. The mobile payments startup closed a $100 million series C led by Kleiner Perkins, a story we broke a few weeks ago. The new round values Square above $1 billion.

Tiger Management is also an investor. And Mary Meeker, the former Morgan Stanley Internet analyst who is now a partner at Kleiner, will get a board seat. She will join other new board members Vinod Khosla and Larry Summers.

Square is bringing credit card payments to a new class of merchants and, eventually consumers. It’s shipped more than 500,000 credit card readers, is processing more than a million transactions per month, and more than $3 million a day. It recently launched an iPad app to replace cash registers and Square devices are now sold in Apple Stores.

Company: Square
Website: squareup.com
Launch Date: February 2009
Funding: $341M

Square is making commerce easy for everyone. Starting with a free credit card reader for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, Square Reader allows anyone to accept credit cards anywhere, anytime, for a low transaction rate of 2.75 percent per swipe, with no hidden fees. Square Register serves as a full point-of-sale system for businesses to accept payments, manage items, and share menu and location information. Square Wallet, available in the US, is the most seamless way to pay,...

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Financial-organization: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Website: kpcb.com
Launch Date: 1972

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) is a well known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, due in large part to their past success. They were early investors in many significant companies, including Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Intuit, Macromedia, Netscape, Segway, and Sun Microsystems. The name of the firm comes from the four founding partners: Eugene Kleiner, Tom Perkins, Frank J. Caufield, and Brook Byers. In March 2008, KPCB announced the iFund, a $100M investment initiative focused on ideas...

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Mary Meeker has joined the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner. Previously she joined Morgan Stanley in 1991 as the Firm’s PC Software/Hardware & New Media analyst. Earlier, she served as a Technology Research Analyst at Cowen and at Solomon Brothers. She received an MBA in Finance from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (1986), and a BA in psychology from DePauw University, in Greencastle, Indiana (1981) . Meeker’s work has been recognized in various Wall Street Analyst...

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