Friday, February 28, 2020
PayRange Inc. disclosed Feb. 25, 2020, that it has completed a $70 million funding round with leading fintech investors, including Matrix Partners and Nyca Partners GV. The funds will support the company's 2020 Consumer Choice Program, an initiative devised to digitize U.S. unattended vending machines, company representatives stated. PayRange, founded by Paresh Patel in 2015, currently serves more than 3 million users in 350 cities and towns in the United States and Canada.
In addition to modernizing the user experience, PayRange is designed help participating merchants capture more sales and offer more payments options to consumers by using the company's patented technology. The mobile solution embeds a dongle-like device inside vending machines that is compatible with smartphone mobile wallets and Bluetooth payment schemes, PayRange representatives noted.
PayRange additionally noted that the mobile app, available at the Apple App Store and Google Play, provides a smart alternative to the practice of coin hoarding. The app supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, electronic bank funds transfer, Mastercard, Visa, Discover and American Express. Card details and sensitive customer data are never sent to the machine. Customers can search the mobile app for promotional offers, the company stated.
"Gone are the days of digging for loose change or waiting for your card to process," the PayRange website states. "With a swipe up on your phone, making everyday payments is simple — for everyone."
The dongle can be retrofitted into legacy devices and is also available in brand new machines. PayRange expects the mobile app's simple implementation and broad compatibilities to significantly boost mobile app adoption by using Bluetooth, NFC to facilitate a broad range of electronic payments schemes. Plans are underway to upgrade a million laundry and vending to accept mobile payments through the company's hardware-as-a-service (HaaS) subscription-based model, stated Michael Kitchen, chief revenue officer at PayRange.
"We realized that the initial upfront investment was a hurdle preventing owners from upgrading, so we developed the Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) model, allowing operators to finally bring their unnetworked machines into the digital age," Kitchen said. "We have only begun our initial rollout of the program and are already signing up ten thousand machines a week. We are very pleased with the early results of this program and expect demand will outstrip our initial one million device supply."
Kitchen went on to say that the digital revolution is disrupting millions of vending, laundry and cash-based machines, which until now had been costly and cumbersome to operate. In addition to eliminating manual coin collection, the PayRange app will offer loyalty programs, discounts and promotions aimed at improving the customer experience. And PayRange operators will have turnkey deployment, he added.
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