flint mobile
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Flint Mobile provided mobile payment acceptance without a separate card reader, initially using photos of payment cards to collect their details.
02 / flint mobile FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Flint Mobile failed because payment-processing margins were too thin to sustain its business. Unlike Square's dongle, Flint let merchants accept cards by scanning them with a phone camera, but the economics of small-business payments left almost no room for a startup to earn a return. After raising just over $20 million, the company ran out of options and shut its service down in February 2016, directing customers to Stripe.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Payment processing stopped
In February 2016 Flint stopped payment processing and directed users to Stripe. It announced that services would go offline on 27 February unless operations could be extended.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Flint Mobile raised just over $20 million in venture funding, with its last round led by Verizon in 2014.
- 02
Payment acceptance on its processing platform was deactivated on February 18, 2016.
- 03
Flint services went offline for good on February 27, 2016; the company pointed customers to Stripe as an alternative.
- 04
No reliable loss figure with a clear subject, period and basis exists, so no loss amount is recorded.