card.io
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
card.io was a San Francisco startup founded by former AdMob employees Mike Mettler and Josh Bleecher Snyder. It built an SDK that let mobile apps scan credit cards with the smartphone's camera — developers could capture card numbers and related information from a photo instead of manual entry or a hardware dongle like Square's card reader. The technology was offered to iOS and Android developers as a self-contained payment-enablement kit. In July 2012 it was acquired by PayPal, which folded the card-scanning technology into its mobile applications, including PayPal Here.
02 / FAILURE REASONS
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03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Founded by former AdMob employees Mike Mettler and Josh Bleecher Snyder; raised $1 million in seed funding and launched its camera-based credit-card scanning SDK for iOS and Android.
- Acquired by PayPal
Acquired by PayPal in July 2012 (terms undisclosed) after working with PayPal on its Here mobile app; the card.io team joined PayPal's global product team in San Jose, and the SDK remained available to developers.
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 / AFTERMATH
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