Five years after getting acquired by PayPal for $800 million, Chicago mobile payments company Braintree says it has now processed half a trillion dollars in payment volume.
The company announced in a blog post that it has processed over $500 billion in payments since joining PayPal in 2013. It's a major jump from the $50 billion in payments Braintree said it processed just three years ago.
Braintree added that year-over-year revenue was up more than 50 percent last year, and it processed 6 billion transactions in 2018 alone.
That growth can be attributed to a host of new businesses that have joined its platform in 2018, including KFC Australia, BP, TripAdvisor, TicketMaster and Sprout Social. Braintree also became the first payments company to let businesses accept Venmo as payment, and this year merchants like Uber and Grubhub were able to accept Venmo payments for the first time. Braintree acquired Venmo for $26 million in 2012, a year before it was bought by PayPal.
PayPal's acquisition of Braintree/Venmo is considered one of the most important acquisitions in tech as the growth of mobile payments has skyrocketed.
"Braintree has become the platform for large and fast-growing enterprises that are building the most innovative commerce experiences globally, and we’re incredibly proud of it," Braintree GM Juan Benitez wrote in the company blog post.
Braintree was founded in 2007 at the University of Chicago by Bryan Johnson, who is currently building Kernel, his new Silicon Valley-based startup that’s developing a tiny computer chip that will be implanted in the human brain to combat neurological damage. Johnson has put $100 million of his own money into the venture.
