There is a profusion of dongles on the market to allow merchants or individuals to accept credit card payments with little differentiation from Square, but startup CardFlight’s offering seems to give more value to merchants and could be more appealing at an enterprise level than Square’s product.
CardFlight allows customers to embed credit card payment acceptance into their own apps. This distinguishes it from Square, which controls the hardware, software and user experience at the point of sale.
The company, founded in February 2013, has received $1.6 million in funding as of yesterday, led by ff Venture Capital. Additional funders of CardFlight include Payment Ventures, Apostolos Apostolakis, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Plug & Play Ventures, and Great Oaks Venture Capital.
CardFlight offers a software development kit for both iOS and Android platforms and connects with 23 different payment processors including Stripe, to which it is sometimes compared, and Braintree, owned by PayPal. A partnership with Stripe kicked off the company’s round of beta testing in May 2013.
The company also provides the card reader to plug into a mobile device. Merchants can employ their own apps and control the user experience at the point of sale. The dongles themselves can be branded if ordered in a sufficient quantity.
TechCrunch reports that CardFlight has seen “tremendous demand,” with hundreds of developers on its wait list.