PayTango
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
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Sections to complete：02 · 05
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
PayTango was a Carnegie Mellon student startup built by seniors Brian Groudan, Kelly Lau-Kee, Umang Patel and Christian Reyes in professor Luis von Ahn's Tech Startup Lab course. It developed a fingerprint-based payment and identification system: users placed two fingers on a terminal fingerpad and swiped a card once to register; repeat visits required only the fingerprint, with transactions processed in under six seconds through the merchant's point-of-sale system. It piloted at three campus locations and joined Y Combinator's Winter 2013 batch.
02 / FAILURE REASONS
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03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Four Carnegie Mellon seniors build PayTango, a fingerprint payment system, in Luis von Ahn's Tech Startup Lab course.
- YC and campus pilots
PayTango pilots at three Carnegie Mellon campus locations, joins Y Combinator's Winter 2013 batch, and is named one of Inc. magazine's 'America's Coolest College Startups'.
- Pivot and fade
PayTango pivots from biometric payments to simple invoicing software; Y Combinator later lists the company as inactive with no acquisition or public closure announced.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
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Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN / AFTERMATH
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