FitPay Raises $3.1 Million Seed Round to Fund Contactless Payments Platform

FitPay Pagare with PebbleFitPay has announced the closing of $3.1  million in seed funding led by Giesecke & Devrient (G&D). FitPay was founded by payment industry veterans Michael Orlando, Scott Stevelinck and Chris Orlando. Th co-founders have worked at companies like Visa and CyberSource.  G&D is a supplier of mobile security products and solutions so the investment makes strategic sense.  FitPay has created a “payment enablement platform” that allows wearable devices to easily integrate contactless payment functionality into their devices. Think smartstraps for the Pebble smartwatch.  The Apple Pay competitor uses Near Field Communication (NFC) tech, married with card network tokenization to interact with point-of-sale terminals at retail locations. FitPay has now has access to an estimated 9 million retail locations worldwide. Fit Pay’s solution labeled “Trusted Payment Manager” allows contactless payment capabilities on a wide range of wearable devices. Future applications may include transit, secure authentication, and other secure identification use cases and more.Michael Orlando

“The G&D investment not only validates our core business proposition of enabling a wider range of products to transact contactless payments, but also brings a strategic partner that will help us accelerate our growth,” said Michael Orlando, FitPay’s co-founder and CEO.

Scott Marquardt, President of G&D, said they were pleased to support FitPay’s vision of contactless payment.  Marquardt explained the synergies between the two companies;

“… in combination with G&D’s capabilities in embedded secure operating systems, applications and credentials lifecycle management, brings a complete end-to-end portfolio to Fit Pay’s prospective wearable device partners.”

FitPay PagareThis past December FitPay was the winner of the Comerica Bank and RocketSpace $50,000 Wearable FinTech Startup Challenge. Next week, FitPay will enter the rewards based crowdfunding arena with a campaign on Kickstarter. The company has developed a smartstrap named Pagaré that immediately adds payment abilities to the Pebble watch – one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time.éFit Pay completed San Francisco-based Plug and Play Tech Center’s FinTech Accelerator Program last fall. Plug and Play participated in this seed-funding round as well. In December, Fit Pay was selected from among hundreds of participants as the winner of the Comerica Bank and RocketSpace $50,000 Wearable FinTech Startup Challenge.

Fit Pay will launch a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign on February 8, 2016 to support the commercialization of a payment smartstrap the company has developed for the Pebble Time family of smartwatches.


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