AngelList, arguably the leading crowdsourcing sites for startups, has apparently removed the listing for a company that aims to be the “PayPal for firearms.”
Yesterday, AngelList pushed out an email promoting GunTab, the startup, to Angel’s contact list. But by this morning, the listing for GunTab was yielding a 404 error, meaning that the page was removed from the AngelList site.
AngelList did not reply to a request for comment.
AngelList currently lists more than 430,000 companies, including 48,000 seeing investment funds.
That is not to say GunTab has holstered its operations. GunTab can be found online and maintains a Twitter feed (@useguntab), but the service has not yet launched. It is based where gun culture and tech culture intersect — Austin, Texas — and its founders promote past experience at Apple and the London School of Economics. GunTab plans to charge sellers a 3% transaction fee, versus PayPal’s 2.9% plus $0.30.
Despite Angel’s apparent action, the need for GunTab appears to be present. PayPal is notoriously risk-averse about providing its service to anything related to alcohol, firearms, pornography, or medical marijuana. From GunTab’s site:
Nowhere has the firearm industry’s enterprising spirit been more apparent than with e-commerce. After eBay banned firearms in 1999, an “eBay of guns” was created. After Craigslist prohibited firearms in 2007, a “Craigslist of guns” was soon born. But some things are more difficult than others.
After PayPal was purchased by eBay in 2002, it prohibited firearm-related transactions. However, no “PayPal of guns” followed. There were a few attempts to create it, but none were successful. As a result, firearm e-commerce was stuck in the digital stone age. People spent years mailing personal checks to each other, waiting weeks for payment processing, and suffering from scams. That was the status quo for over a decade.
GunTab is looking to remedy this, but it seems its funding strategy now has some, er, holes to work out.