CardFlight, The Stripe For Real-World Payments, Has Raised $1.6 Million From ff Venture Capital

CardFlight was founded to enable any developer to create his or her own branded app and take in-person credit card payments from it. To accomplish this, it’s raised $1.6 million in funding as it moves to support more customers with its card reader and mobile SDKs.

The company received $1.6 million in funding that was led by ff Venture Capital, with additional participation from Payment Ventures, Apostolos Apostolakis, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Plug & Play Ventures, and Great Oaks Venture Capital. Along with the funding, ffVC founding partner John Frankel will join the company’s board.

CardFlight was launched earlier this year by the team behind loyalty startup LocalBonus, as a way to provide small businesses with their own way to build apps that accept in-person credit card payments. Just as Stripe provides an SDK for payments that happen online and through mobile apps, CardFlight provides tools enabling developers to take and process payments. The difference is that CardFlight focuses on the 90 percent of credit card transactions that still happen in the real world.

While other companies like Square and PayPal have provided businesses with the ability to collect payments with mobile credit card readers, businesses are reliant on the provider’s apps to process those payments. CardFlight provides its clients with card readers, and also gives them an SDK to build payment processing into their own branded apps.

CardFlight has SDKs available for both iOS and Android platforms, and connects with 23 different payment processors. The company’s gateway also allows clients to connect apps with their own internal CRM, inventory management, fulfillment, and reporting and analytics tools.

While it’s focused on helping businesses that want to create their own apps, CardFlight has also been used by several vertical solutions providers — that is, third-party developers who build apps for companies that don’t have the technical know-how to do so themselves. That extends the potential reach for CardFlight to provide white-labeled in-person payments for clients.

CardFlight has seen tremendous demand for its service since launch: It has hundreds of app developers signed up on its waiting list, according to CEO Derek Webster. The funding will be used to grow its team — currently at seven employees — to quickly ramp up and support more potential customers.

Growing the team will not only give it the ability to catch more clients, but also will enable it to diversify its own products and to expand reach into new verticals. While it’s been particularly strong with event organizers like EventFarm, it sees opportunities in a wide range of use cases.