Payment platform Braintree blossoms with $35M

Payments startup Braintree has received a $35 million to continue expanding its platform and stay competitive in an increasingly saturated space.

Braintree powers online and mobile credit card transactions for e-commerce vendors. It provides a gateway that makes issuing and accepting online payments more accessible and simple than before, when payment processing required extensive infrastructure and resources. By integrating the software, retailers can not only process credit cards, but also create merchant accounts, enable single click checkout, safely store information, and manage recurring billing.

The company strives to democratize e-commerce by making it possible for new and small businesses that do not want to use a middleman.

“We are working to do for payments and e-commerce what Apple did for mobile: providing a developer-friendly platform that sparks a new wave of innovation and company-building,” said CEO Bill Ready in a statement. “By making it simple to access the most sophisticated elements of the payment networks without having to be experts in payments, we will help countless businesses capture new market opportunities while consumers gain a world of exciting new mobile and online shopping experiences.”

Startups like Airbnb, Uber, LivingSocial, Heroku, AngryBirds, Fab.com, Github are Braintree clients, along with 3,000 others. The platform can deal with international payments in over 130 currencies and is processing more than $5 billion in payments annually.

In August, Braintree acquired social payments platform Venmo which specializes in mobile transactions. The acquisition was part of an effort to introduce digital wallets. The company also recently rolled out Braintree Instant, which gives merchants the ability to instantly approve payments.

With this $35 million, Braintree will continue to develop its product line and expand internationally. This second round of financing was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from venture capital firm Accel Partners, which led the $34 million Series A round last June, RRE and Greycroft. This brings Braintree’s total investment to $70 million.

Its main competitors are PayPal and Stripe. The company is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Silicon Valley and New York and was founded in 2007.