On Raising $12.75 Million in Baltimore to Help Businesses Everywhere

Some of the team hanging out at our new office in the Natty Boh Tower.

We’re Blispay, a fintech startup based in Baltimore. Although we got started over a year ago, we’ve kept our fundraising accomplishments, company mission, and product details under wraps until now. We wanted to focus all of our attention on building our company, our amazing team, and our awesome first product. Now that we’ve come out of our Friends & Family phase and have launched to the public, it’s time to share our story with the world outside of our [new] office.

Funding

Here is some information about our seed funding:

$12.75 Million Raised
Led by FirstMark Capital, Accomplice, NEA, and TriplePoint Capital
Participation by Founder Collective, an AngelList syndicate led by Wayne Chang (founder of Crashlytics), and a cast of fintech all-stars also participating
Our Angel investors include Hill Ferguson (formerly the Chief Product Officer at PayPal), Vince Talbert (co-founder of Bill Me Later), and Kevin Wren (retired Vice Chairman of MBNA)
As part of the raise, FirstMark Managing Director Amish Jani joins our board of directors

Team

Our Founder and CEO is Greg Lisiewski. He spent most of his career at MBNA, Bill Me Later, and then PayPal after PayPal acquired Bill Me Later in 2008 for ~$945 Million.

We currently have 14 employees; half are in product development and design, with the rest in risk, finance, accounting, operations, legal and compliance. Everyone at our company has worked at one or more of the following companies:

We’re pretty proud of this. Most are (or were) small-medium sized companies that saw some success and failure as they grew. We think the experience at these companies will serve us well as we eventually transition from tiny to small, then small to medium, and then medium to large.

In addition to our immediate team, we have great advisors on board including Clypd Co-founder & CEO Joshua Summers, Knewton CTO Ryan Prichard, and former Facebook Head of Mobile Dave Fetterman.

Our team is nowhere near complete. WE’RE HIRING! Email us at [email protected] if you don’t see a job that fits you on AngelList.

In Pursuit of Helping Businesses

Although we’re launching the Blispay Visa® Card to consumers, we’re not just building consumer products. We exist to help businesses. We’re passionate about this.

Message to Merchants Everywhere

If you’re like the hundreds of merchants we’ve spoken with over the past couple years who think you’d sell more if you offered financing but were overwhelmed by the process and cost of the current offerings in the market, then you need to reach out to us. We set out to create the simplest, lowest maintenance, and most cost-effective financing product that exists. Even if you offer financing already (like some of the merchants in our pipeline), offering Blispay alongside your current offering gives your customers more choice and can lower your overall costs since you don’t have to pay us any more than you pay for accepting any other Visa credit card. We love hearing merchants say that it sounds too good to be true… it makes us smile every time.

Moving beyond Friends & Family

This is our favorite part of this post. Our team spent all of 2015 heads down building our tooling, infrastructure, and product. 2016 has been a series of memorable moments and we’re not even halfway done. It was awesome for our team members to test our cards around Baltimore when the rest of the world around us had never heard of this thing called ‘Blispay’. It was even more rewarding when we started inviting our friends & family to apply and we watched as they used their cards more and more each day. We couldn’t be happier to enter this next phase by making Blispay available to everyone starting this week!

THANK YOU

Friends & Family: We cannot thank you enough. Your support, feedback (good and bad) has been super valuable. We love you and hope you continue to enjoy Blispay. We promise to put everything we have into improving it over time by offering more features and flexible financing programs.

WELCOME NEW CUSTOMERS

New & Future Customers: Blispay is by no means perfect yet. Knowing us, we’ll never be fully satisfied because that’s just the type of product people we are. But we’re proud of our first version. Apply today at blispay.com (our iOS and Android apps will be available soon).

WELCOME MERCHANTS

We’re super excited to launch with a handful of merchants in April. They’re the reason we exist. Their feedback so far has been extremely valuable and we look forward to a bright and long future together. If you’re interested in learning about how we can help each other then please reach out to us at blispay.com/merchants.