(June 29, 2011) Square Inc., the mobile device payments company co-founded by Twitter creator and St. Louis native Jack Dorsey, has secured $100 million in Series C financing in a round led by new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with participation from Tiger Global Management LLC.
Launched in early 2010, San Francisco-based Square, which has an office in St. Louis, now reportedly processes nearly $4 million in transactions a day. It has distributed hundreds of thousands of free credit card readers that can be plugged into iPhone and Android phones and iPads, for which the company has also built a free point of sale system for businesses to accept payments, track inventory and share menu and location information.
This latest round values the company at $1.6 billion, sources told The New York Times. The company is expected to bring in $40 million in revenue but has yet to turn a profit.
Kleiner Perkins Partner Mary Meeker will join Square's board as part of the investment, joining two other new board members named this month, Harvard University professor and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures.
Square previously announced a $27.5 million Series B round of venture financing led by Sequoia Capital in January, which followed a $10 million first round led by Khosla in November 2009. Credit card giant Visa Inc. also invested an undislclosed amount in April. In addition to his post as CEO at Square, Dorsey, who was Twitter's original CEO, returned to Twitter in March as executive chairman.
Dorsey co-founded the startup with another St. Louisan, Jim McKelvey, president of Mira Digital Publishing and founder of Third Degree Glass Factory.
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