PayPal acquires Card.io, which captures credit card info with phone cameras

Making sure to keep its fingers in all of the mobile payment pies, PayPal announced today that it has snapped up Card.io, a startup that has developed technology to capture credit card information with your smartphone camera.

Card.io, which was one of the startups featured in our MobileBeat competition last year, caught PayPal’s eye when it was working on integrating the credit card capture technology in the PayPal Here app, according to new PayPal mobile head Hill Ferguson.

“We were simply blown away by the creativity and drive of their employees,” Ferguson wrote on the PayPal blog today. “They are a passionate and independent team that likes solving large, complex problems, and we wanted them to join our team.”

Card.io’s credit scanning technology can be found in popular apps like Uber and TaskRabbit. For consumers, it’s a dead simple way to input payment information without typing in your credit card number by hand. (Seriously, all you need to do is hold your card up.) And it’s a seamless way for developers to get hold of valuable consumer payment information within their apps.

The Card.io team will join PayPal’s global product team in San Jose, Calif., and will work on “new experiences” that will simplify PayPal’s wallet app. PayPal says the existing Card.io technology will still be available for developers to use in their apps.

Card.io was founded by two early AdMob employees: Michael Mettler (CEO) and Josh Bleecher Snyder (CTO). The company’s angel investors include Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal, Jeff Clavier and Charles Hudson of SoftTech VC, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures, Alok Bhanot (former VP, Risk Technology at PayPal), and Omar Hamoui (CEO and founder of AdMob).