PayStand, an online payment as a service vendor, has launched from its private beta selling its payment processing services for bitcoin, e-checks, and credit cards to websites in the U.S.
The Santa Cruz, Calif.-based company said that its payment service can work with any website or mobile application and can be set up in under five minutes.
As part of its launch from beta, the company also said it had raised $1 million in seed financing from investors, including Cervin Ventures, Serra Ventures, Central Coast Angels, and TiE LaunchPad.
“Essentially it solves some of the card network problems,” said Jeremy Almond, PayStand’s chief executive. “We don’t think the card networks go away… [but] not all transactions need to go through the card networks. This gives merchants an easy way to take credit card processing and create a cash like system which also takes digital currencies.”
In a closed beta since 2013, PayStand began as a result of Almond’s own investments and experiments with digital currencies.
Thinking that the cryptocurrency would never be widely adopted if it were only deployed as a standalone payment solution, Almond decided to develop his flexible payment software, which would accept all comers.
Merchants pay a monthly fee for the payment software and avoid transaction fees charged by other payment services. Customers, meanwhile, will get informed of the costs associated with each transaction method, ranging from 2.9 percent for a credit card purchase, 25 cents for online check, and no charge for making a bitcoin-based payment.
If merchants receive their payments in bitcoin, they can enter their bitcoin wallet addresses with PayStand and have the cryptocurrency deposited in their wallets. Or if they want cash they can enter their exchange address so they can exchange it to dollars.
“We believe that the process of money movement is going through a massive evolution, and our goal is to support this broadly,” Almond said.