

Accel Puts $34 Million In Online Payments Platform Braintree - dan_manges
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/accel-puts-34-million-in-online-payments-platform-braintree/

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vrikhter
Great news for Braintree. What's impressive here is the kind of companies
Accel is backing. Companies that are highly profitable without any initial
funding and are now raising capital to really hit it out of the ballpark.
99Designs ($35M Series A), Atlassian ($60M Series A), Rovio ($42M Series A), &
SquareSpace ($38.5M Series A). These are all great companies who once they
found a great model went on to decide to dominate the market. Congrats all
around!

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larrykubin
Just wanted to say that working with Braintree to implement our payments
solution last year was a great experience. I can't recommend them highly
enough. It is amazing to be able to ask very specific questions about the API
or chargebacks/terms/legal matters and be able to get clear explanations from
a real person so quickly.

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hnsmurf
This is the kind of company that's supposed to get a VC round. Profitable,
growing, unquestionable business model, solving pain points, etc.

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pitdesi
From a few months ago... Braintree: Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud "I think
VC-funded companies are more inclined to throw money and people at
opportunities and problems" [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2800-bootstrapped-
profitable-...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2800-bootstrapped-profitable-
proud-braintree)

Congrats to them - this is another great win for Chicago.

Based on the article it seems they did $4.5 mil in rev in 2010... curious to
see how that led to such a high valuation, even given the growth numbers.

In terms of future growth, we've had Braintree customers switch to other
processors using FeeFighters and were blown away by how much money they saved.
Customers love their service but get angry when they realize how much they
have overpaid on their merchant account. I wonder if it's sustainable from
that perspective.

EDIT: In case it was not clear from what I said above, I work for FeeFighters.

Also - Bryan has posted a response about why they raised on Braintree's blog.
Valid points. [http://www.braintreepayments.com/inside-
braintree/braintrees...](http://www.braintreepayments.com/inside-
braintree/braintrees-34-million-accel-investment-yesterday-today-tomorrow)

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davepeck
I'm using Braintree for my new app (<https://www.getcloak.com/>) and am
extremely happy. They have incredibly responsive customer support, both
business and technical.

When I reported a unicode-related bug in their Python API, the technical team
responded coherently within a few hours and released a new API revision within
48. Can't beat that...

On the API front there are some minor issues. For example, their subscription
API is excellent except when dealing with upgrades/downgrades. Upgrades can be
prorated and billed immediately; downgrades (sensibly) must wait until the
next billing cycle. Unfortunately, the downgrade is _recorded_ immediately --
you don't have a notion of a pending plan. Hence a user can downgrade/upgrade
repeatedly during a _single_ billing cycle and end up spending an arbitrarily
large amount of money.

