Globes reported a rumored $1.5 million A round for Tactus Mobile, an Israeli startup in the mobile payments space. The round was led by Lool Ventures, an incubator/micro fund started by ex AOL/Yedda execs Yaniv Golan and Avichay Nissenbaum and joined by Israeli angel Yuval Tal (founder of several payment startups including Payoneer) and additional private investors who led the company’s seed round.
Tactus Mobile Solutions focuses on mobile wallet applications, powered by smartphones. Its products are still under wraps, but according to the company’s LinkedIn profile, “the system provides secure mobile payments, all from your mobile phone using a unified platform for fast transaction processing and enhanced ease of use“.
While there are several other mobile payments platforms in the market including Google Wallet (see disclaimer) the Tactus payments platform aims to differentiate itself by significantly reducing losses due to security risks, leveraging several anti fraud and identity theft mechanisms.
Tactus’ flagship product is called “ZooZ” (move in Hebrew). It’s an app available on both Android and the Apple appstore. The app enables users to link their phone with a credit card.
The ZooZ website is very consumer oriented, and the clear call to action is to sign up and download the app. However, it’s clear that Tactus’ long-term play is on the merchant side by enabling merchants to plug in their loyalty plans and adding social commerce features and word of mouth marketing for businesses. See this cached version of the Tactus website for more info on the merchant appeal.
Tactus was founded by Oren Levy (CEO) and Ronen Morecki (CTO) in July 2010. Previously, TactusMobile focused on developing mobile apps including iPolls (a social polling app) and iTag (uses the phone as a name tag). The company currently has a total of six employees.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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