This article first appeared in Term Sheet, Coins2Day’s newsletter about deals and dealmakers. Sign up here.
Remember Dwolla? The Des Moines payments company made a splash in the early part of this decade when it raised cash from Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Ashton Kutcher. (It has raised a total of $32.5 million.) But aside from a fine over its data security claims, it’s been relatively quiet for the last year. Dwolla is most well-known for its consumer-facing peer-to-peer payments product, which launched before PayPal-owned Venmo became the hit it is today.
In December the company pulled its consumer-facing app from the app store and asked its users to switch to Current, a payments startup. A few readers wrote me speculating the company was dead. But that’s not the case.
Rather, Dwolla is going all-in on its SaaS platform. The company has raised $6.85 million led by The Foundry Group and Union Square Ventures to support the new strategy. High Alpha Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, NextLevel Ventures, and Detroit Venture Partners participated in the round. Further, the company will no longer add head count to its San Francisco office, focusing hiring efforts on its headquarters in Des Moines.
Dwolla’s primary focus will be a product called Access API, which allows businesses and developers to integrate the banking system into their software. The platform has attracted more than 100 customers in its first year.
Founder and CEO Ben Milne tells Term Sheet the transition has been “a little bit humbling.” Dwolla’s initial thesis was to help people move money around the Internet faster and cheaper, and now it is helping other companies facilitate that with its platform.
“Dwolla got a ton of media attention when the company wasn’t really anything yet,” he says. “There were a lot of ideas about what the company could become.” The biggest snag was distribution, he says. He initially thought banks and banking regulators would move faster than they did. But there is demand for the company’s white label payments platform. “We need to galvanize around what’s working and be honest about what didn’t,” Milne says.
