Fingerprint payment has arrived
Updated
Fingerprint payment. It has been talked about. It took a long time. But it has arrived. A San Francisco start-up, Pay By Touch Solutions, announces today $130 million in fresh financing to roll out a way for you to use your fingerprint to pay for groceries and other goods and services.
Here is the Mercury News story (free registration) that ran today.
These guys were smart. They realized there was all this cash sloshing around at hedge funds. So they went out and tried their luck. The capital raised — $55 million of it in convertible notes and $75 million in loans — will help the company build out its finger-reading payment systems at several nationwide retailers, including in California in the first quarter of next year.
Update: VentureWire follows with a story (sub required), and includes this tidbit: Pay By Touch Chief Executive John Rogers said the company expects to file for an IPO within the next 18 months, is and already holding what Rogers calls “pre-meetings” with institutional investors.
.
Next Story: Ageia wants to be the next revolutionary game chip
Previous Story: Andreessen's Ning unveiled
About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
