Mobile Payments Firm Zipmark Closes $2 Million Round

Mobile payments company Zipmark Inc. recently closed $2 million in seed funding, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Jay Bhattacharya tells Bank Innovation.

Zipmark will disclose the identities of its investors within 45 days, after some smaller investors come on board, Bhattacharya says.

At its core, the Zipmark service allows consumers or businesses to pay one another electronically with their smartphones, a payments area that has also been grabbing the attention of many banks in recent months.

With securing $2 million funding, Bhattacharya hopes to blow out the Zipmark pilots. One company already testing Zipmark specializes in commercial real estate, a niche that the technology company hopes to expand further into, particularity relating to apartment buildings.

“There’s a great market in New York,” he says. “We are trying to go to aggregation points so we don’t have to chase down every [apartment] owner.”

Zipmark tells Bank Innovation that it is looking to link up with industries that continue to rely heavily on paper checks. Beyond the real estate market, utilities are another industry in need of payment surgery, Bhattacharya says.

It is because Zipmark focuses on a niche — checking and paying — that Bhattacharya believes the startup can navigate the crowded payments landscape that includes such giants as Google and American Express. In other words, Bhattacharya identifies customized payments as the future. The primary challenge lying ahead for his alternative payments company mirror the obstacle facing every payment system: growing out a user base. To accomplish that, Bhattacharya says Zipmark aims to acquire customers by establishing relationships with billers.

“Payments used to be a single solution, and now we have the opportunity to [offer] customized solutions for specific people,” he says.

Zipmark, which participated in this year’s annual New York FinTech Innovation Lab, also offers billers online and paper payment options. If billers send customers physical invoices, they can include barcodes on those documents, for example. In turn, consumers can scan the paper invoices’ barcodes with their smartphones’ cameras to pay the bills through the Zipmark app. Watch a demo of the technology below:

Zipmark Demo from Jay Bhattacharya on Vimeo.