After selling his latest company, Jajah, to Telefonica for $207 million a year ago, co-founder Daniel Mattes has set his sights on the electronic payments market.
Mattes, who has apparently been baptized the “Bill Gates of the Alps”, has started a new company called Jumio.
Not much is known about the company to date, and this is its vague pitch on the website:
“You buy. You sell. And Jumio is making everything in between a lot easier.”
Tom Foremski met with Mattes earlier this year and believes Jumio will become one of the hottest startups of 2011.
According to Foremski, Mattes has figured out a way to make secure digital payments that cannot be hacked. Mattes said he discovered a patent filed by two engineers based in Israel and acquired it for several hundred thousand dollars:
This technology will make it possible to provide payments services at a far lower rate than the credit card companies because the risk of fraud has been removed. Jumio is currently working on the infrastructure for the payments system but it will also license its technology to large retailers such as Amazon to run on their platform.
He won’t yet say how he can guarantee that his payments systems cannot be defrauded — but I’m looking forward to finding out.
And now Mattes has tapped a friend of his, Bosnian opera singer Jasmin Bašić, to tease us a little more by having the tenor sing the Christmas classic ‘Silent Night’ with custom lyrics.
Enjoy and happy holidays.