SALT Technology gets more than a dash of funding
- James Wester
The mobile payment space has a new serious contender, and this one just put $2 million in the bank. SALT Technology Inc., a San Francisco-based mobile payment startup, announced that it has secured $2 million in funding. The company said the money is coming from private investors with "deep roots" in mobile and payments.
SALT Technology is offering a full suite of white label mobile payment solutions: the SALT Payment Platform; a secure mobile wallet called the SALT Personal Payment Profile; and even merchant acquiring through SALT Merchant Services. The company is targeting providers who are looking to bring their own branded mobile payment products to market — companies such as mobile network operators, financial institutions and merchants.
"We're not part of a cadre of 'me-too' mobile wallets," said SALT Technology Inc. CEO and President Brian Bogosian in a call with Mobile Payments Today. "It's a far more extensive and complete wallet."
Bogosian said SALT Technology is taking a far broader approach to mobile payments so that a broad spectrum of companies with an interest in bringing a mobile payment solution to their customers can do so. "We're not an over-the-top solution looking to disintermediate the incumbents," Bogosian said. "We're facilitating and enabling those companies that have billions of customers."
According to Bogosian, the SALT Technology suite of products will be completely technology agnostic, supporting NFC, barcodes, cloud-based payments, online purchases and peer-to-peer payments — basically, whatever a customer wants to deploy.
As for the $2 million in new money, Bogosian said the funding will go toward continued development of the company's products as well as toward sales and marketing. The company's initial push will be aimed at the North American and European markets but Bogosian said its solution has global applications.
SALT Technology is seeing significant interest from large MNOs at this point, Bogosian said. He added that the company is already in contract talks with a large MNO. Bogosian couldn't divulge which MNO SALT Technology is working with but he did say the company is expecting to have a solution deployed in the third quarter of 2013.
Bogosian also said the interest in SALT Technology mobile payment solutions has been so high that he doesn't expect this current round of funding to be the last. "We're getting lots of inquiries," he said. "I expect to have news on additional capital in the weeks and months ahead."
