Spreedly.com: Making Ecommerce Easier

The fifth in a series of articles that highlight companies selected to Demo at the CED Tech Venture Conference 2013.

Conducting commerce online still isn’t as easy as it should be. Companies that accept online payment, such as limo services or flower delivery companies, can find themselves in a pinch, especially when doing business via mobile devices, globally.

Spreedly.com was spawned in 2007 when Nathaniel Talbott and a group of consultants were working on a project and found that it took longer to get PayPal’s recurring billing to work than to complete the actual project. He devised a better way, and launched the first version of Spreedly in 2008.

He found the problem to lie in the wide range of payment processing options. Companies accept many kinds of online payments, and for each of those types, a different payment gateway may be required. Payment gateways (services that authorize and protect payments) encrypt sensitive information such as credit card numbers to ensure that information passed between the customer, the merchant and the payment processor remains a secure loop. With hundreds of payment gateways, that link between clients and businesses need to be streamlined, and that’s what Spreedly is out to do.

That lightweight subscription-based version from 2008 was a bit constraining for customers, so in October 2011 Justin Benson joined the team as CEO and moved the business model away from subscriptions to allow for one time transactions. The overhaul was complete in March 2013, when Benson refreshed the website and changed the name from SpreedlyCore to Spreedly.

“Now is the optimal time for Spreedly,” said Benson. “There are great opportunities for ecommerce platforms, and the growth potential for global mobile solutions is bigger than ever. We certainly have big name competition, like PayPal, Square, and Groupon, but we uniquely allow vendors to work with multiple payment gateways simultaneously. In August we passed some major milestones. 100 customers. 100,000 successful credit card transactions equating to more than $100 million processed on an annualized basis.”

Today’s Spreedly is essentially a credit card vault in the cloud that stores information independently from payment gateways. Customers are able to work with one or multiple payment gateways such as MIGS, WorldPay, and PayPal, over time or simultaneously. Supporting 53 payment gateways in 71 countries and vaulting data for more than 100,000 credit cards, Spreedly facilitates transaction globally, while keeping the processing local.

Benson is excited to now be working in North Carolina. Although he lived in the Bay area for 10 years, and Boston for six years, North Carolina has employee loyalty like no place he has lived before. He is also pleasantly surprised to find how accessible the rest of the United States and Europe are to the region.

Spreedly, which kicks off a new round of fundraising in Nov/Dec, plans to take full advantage of the networking that is a focal point of the CED Tech Venture Conference. Join him there, September 17-18, 2013 in the Raleigh Convention Center.