PayPal has proven that it can stand on its own after splitting from online retail giant eBay.
After acquiring payments technology company Paydiant and international money transfer firm Xoom, the company based in San Jose, Calif., continued its shopping spree and announced Wednesday that it was buying Modest, a mobile commerce platform from Chicago.
Modest was founded by four engineers for the re-election campaign of President Barack Obama in 2013. Forbes reported the startup was launched at the beginning of 2015 and has only a paltry number of small business clients. Modest CEO and cofounder Harper Reed said there is a distinct "synergy" between his company and PayPal and noted that the agreement could place Modest's offerings in the lead for thousands of the payments powerhouse's merchants.
Reed said, "E-commerce is a tried and true way to make money on the internet and yet it's so untapped in various aspects of our lives." He referred to the scarcity on most sites of buy buttons as an example saying: "We want to create commerce where commerce doesn't yet exists. Think of it like putting a buy button where a buy button belongs, but where they haven't gone yet."
According to Fortune, that bet on buy buttons that Modest's business has, which allowed people to buy items straight from apps without leaving to another page on the Web, was one of the things that drew PayPal to purchase the company. Modest allowed retailers to install buy buttons within their personal apps including emails. A lot of social networks, including Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook were embedding on their sites buy buttons which enabled customers to purchase items they viewed on the networks. Modest will join PayPal's Braintree business, Braintree has recently teamed up with Pinterest to aid process payments for the buy button on the site.
Reed disclosed to VentureBeat why he and his co-founder sold Modest. He said, "This won't be any fun if we're not able to scale. If we can build a great product, but can't push this out to millions, then it's boring...we found this amazing cheat code to get to scale."
"We're really excited to have Harper and Modest as part of Braintree...We're going to capitalize on [not only] the merchant experience and knowledge that Modest has, but also the technology. They're great additives to the Braintree platform," chimed in Braintree general manager Juan Benitez.
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