Accel-Backed Payments Gateway Provider Braintree Goes International With Expansion Into 30 New Countries

E-commerce and m-commerce payments platform Braintree has major news today: it’s expanding operations outside of the U.S. and will now become available to thirty additional countries worldwide. The new international offering will operate in a private beta period over the next few months and will then launch publicly in the third quarter of 2012.

Braintree powers and automates online and mobile payments for merchants and companies, including several familiar names in the startup space like LivingSocial, 37Signals, OpenTable, Fab.com, GitHub, Airbnb, Heroku, Engine Yard, Animoto, Shopify, and HotelTonight.

Among the new regions to receive access to Braintree’s full stack are the U.K., the European Union, Australia and Canada. (A complete list is available here.) Initially, participating merchants will be able to use Braintree’s developer sandbox, vault credit card storage system and its customer service offerings, as well as the merchant account and payment gateway that come standard with the service. Next year, Braintree will add support for local, non-credit payment methods, the company says. It’s also planning to expand into even more countries in the near future.

The move comes on the heels of another expansion of the service, but one of a different nature. In April, Braintree opened up slightly to allow developers to test transactions and explore its features and libraries before becoming an approved merchant. Previously, this had not been possible until the company had approved and accepted the merchant into its program.

Braintree, which raised $34 million in funding last year from Accel, currently processes over $4 billion in credit card transactions annually, including around $1 billion in mobile payments. It also supports transactions in over 130 different currencies. At the time of the startup’s Series A, Accel partner Brian Sweeney (now Braintree board member) said the company was “growing, profitable and bootstrapped,” as it had not raised any funding beforehand and had been growing mostly through word-of-mouth. Today, there are over 2,000 merchants on Braintree’s system – a number bound to explode with the international availability arriving now.