SMIT, a China-based company specialising in secure digital content delivery for the pay TV industry and conditional access modules (CAMs), has joined China-based venture capital firm GSR Ventures and Atomico, an international venture capital firm founded in 2006 by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, in a series B funding round of funding worth $10m for iBoxPay. The funding round was disclosed in July.
The China-based target company provides a convenient and secure solution for making and accepting payments via mobile phones with the use of a tiny smart dongle which can be plugged into mobile phone’s earphone jack as a card reader and provides features, such as RFID reader, Barcode Scanner, point-to-point data exchange, USB key, e-signature, etc. China UnionPay, which is the only domestic bank card organisation in China, is a strategic partner with the Company, according to GSR Ventures, whose investment managers James Ding and Zhiwei Yang look after the portfolio company.
The company received 14 million yuan financing (about $2.3m) from GSR Ventures in 2011, brining its total funding to date to about $12.3m.
According to the technology trade press, the service is very competitive in the domestic market because it is the first company that has passed security accreditation of China UnionPay and Banking Card Test Center. Acquiring accreditation from China UnionPay means that the POS devices of iBoxPay have reached the national financial security standards. It is so far the only company that won a China UnionPay accreditation for handset POS machines.
More than 1 million deals have been sealed on iBoxPay platform with a turnover of 1 billion yuan, said online news site, a TechNode.