Silicon Valley's 21-year-old first-time entrepreneur product has yet to be launched to win 25 million dollars in VC

Sina Science and technology news in the early morning of Beijing June 28, Lucas Douplain (Ucas Duplan), who recently graduated from Stanford University, has created a record in Silicon Valley history, and the 21-year-old first-time entrepreneur has been working to develop a mobile payment application for the past two years, Now he has raised 25 million of dollars in seed money for his start-up Clinkle, the biggest seed round in Silicon Valley's history.

Douplain took three years to get a degree in computer science from Stanford University, which he has Anderson Hollowitz from Silicon Valley's renowned venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, risk investor Thiel (Peter Thiel), VC company Accel Partners partner Jim Blaye (Jim Breyer), Intel, personal finance software developer Intuit, former Facebook COO Owen Fannata (Van Natta), Cloud computing company Salesforce CEO Benioff (Marc Benioff) and investors such as Qualcomm and virtualization solutions provider VMware founder have raised 25 million of dollars in seed money.

Application not published

Most surprisingly, Douplain has not yet released his mobile payment application and will not be available for the next few months. In fact, the 50-person team, led by Douplain, is also developing prototypes of the application and testing at Stanford University.

Douplain said he did not seek funding from venture investors, but when he showed investors his development application, investors involuntarily supported him. In addition, his technology has received a number of patents.

It is unclear why the Clinkle application is so attractive to investors that it has prompted them to invest because Douplain declined to disclose details about the application, which is expected to land on iOS and Android platforms later this year. Douplain only said: "Our goal is to fully modernize the way the payment activities operate." What we're trying to do is to make mobile payments match the cash and credit card payments. We have developed a way for consumers to download applications without hardware, from the perspective of software to achieve large-scale operation. ”

Douplain also said that the name "Clinkle" comes from the sound of a coin collision and can be converted into a verb "clink this", meaning that the coin collides with "a tinkling sound".

Surprising reason

There are plenty of surprising reasons for Clinkle to get 25 million dollars in seed money. First, Douplain is poised to enter a crowded market, with mobile payment services such as Square and PayPal clearly taking the lead in the market, raising huge sums of money, not to mention credit card companies such as American Express. From the Douplain description, it's hard to imagine the difference between clinkle and square wallet services, or why the former is easier to use, because square wallet has already made it possible for users to pay without a receiver.

Second, Douplain even products have not been released. Normally, investors will only give hundreds of thousands of of billions of dollars to entrepreneurs still in stealth mode to see if a start-up company has a future before making a big investment.

Again, this is the first company Douplain created. Parker (Sean Parker) has raised 35 million of billions of dollars for its social video chat website airtime, where former Apple executives and Bill Ran, a prominent entrepreneur, have raised 41 million of billions of dollars for video-sharing social networking and color labs. , but these two people are the fame outside, this is Douplain not have. Even a continuous entrepreneur can hardly raise tens of millions of of billions of dollars for their startups before releasing their products, so how did Douplain, the young first entrepreneur?

Finally, there is a worrying thing: after raising so much money, can Douplain maintain control over clinkle, so that the start-up company to keep momentum and success?

Not unreasonable investment

The Anderson Hollowitz Fund says Douplain has the ability to keep clinkle momentum and explains that the $25 million trillion is not an unreasonable investment for clinkle. Clinkle was originally introduced to the Anderson Hollowitz fund by VMware co-founder Dian Green (Diane Green), who suggested that the fund partner Maggit Winmachels (Margit

Wennmachers) and Douplain met, and then the two sides began the financing negotiations.

Because of the excessive investor, each venture capital company or the investor provides the financing amount is not very high. For Douplain, owning a lot of investors is a good thing. As first-time entrepreneurs, it's wise for Douplain to surround the industry leaders and get guidance from them. At the same time, the mobile payment market has become a large-scale industry, so Douplain will need a lot of money to attract market attention. "Even a small share of the market will require a lot of effort," Winmachels said. ”

Douplain also said: "Money is the cornerstone of society." If we can't let the money flow, then you and I will become farmers. This is a very important area and we have seen how technology can make many things better. But today, we still use cash and credit cards to a large extent. We can't make a mistake in this field, which is why we need a lot of money to do it. There are fraud and security problems in the marketplace, and we are obsessed with creating as good a product as possible. ”

Winmachels says the Douplain is being developed in a very simple way, and the team under his leadership has been refining the technology for the past two years and protecting it from a legal perspective. From a screenshot, Clinkle is very much like a "wallet" that allows users to choose a credit card, cash or gift card on the display as a way of paying.

Douplain's "Go to market" strategy also impressed Anderson Hollowitz fund. Instead of using a business-targeted strategy like Square, Clinkle publishes products on college campuses, targeting college students. Social apps Lulu and chat apps Snapchat have all been successful on campus, and Facebook started on campus since 2004. And if you insist on targeting smaller communities, such as universities, rather than the city as a whole, a small number of businesses will be involved.

Douplain insists: "Clinkle is quite different from everything else in the market." I think all the mobile payment services we've seen so far have limitations, such as Peer-to-peer online payment services (Dwolla and Stripe). Other services allow you to use a credit card (such as square and simple) on your phone. The real big deal is that consumers simply download an app and then use it to replace credit cards and cash. I don't think any other application can do that. "(Tangfeng)