Button, An Eight-Month-Old Startup That Wants Apps To Talk To Each Other, Just Raised $12 Million
The new funding was led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from Greycroft, DCM, VaynerRSE, Slow Ventures, and NBA Commissioner Emeritus David Stern.
Redpoint's Chris Moore will be joining Button's board. In July, Button raised $2.25 million in a round of seed funding.
Button wants to make apps as connected as the internet is.
When you open an app like Resy to book a table at a restaurant and then open Uber to pay for a ride to a restaurant, the different apps historically haven't been connected in any way. This is redundant and annoying for customers, who have to open each app individually to place orders and enter payment information.
Button solves that problem by using "deep-linking," or optimizing the apps on your phone to talk to one another and work cohesively, kind of like the internet. It means you can hail an Uber and see your fare estimate from inside restaurant reservation app Resy. It creates a shortcut for you as a customer, and it lets Button collect and create data connections between your dinner reservation and you hailing a ride to dinner.
"We live in an app world - and when we started Button, our dream was to redefine how apps connected in the mobile economy," Button CEO Michael Jaconi explained in Thursday's fundraising announcement.
"Our goal was to extend app experiences across the mobile ecosystem - to solve the problem that we, as users, so often felt: 'I want something, but I need to navigate through a collection of screens, an app store, a registration, and hopefully I remember what I wanted when the journey began.'
"Our rallying cry is to break down the walls and reduce the friction of this disconnected app world."
Button's potential caught the eye of Uber - a company that has raised $4.9 billion - back in October. Button launched its DeepLink Commerce platform in a partnership with Uber in the fall, and Uber showcased Button's development technology during a keynote speech at Concur DevCon.
Now, Button's development technology can be used by other appmakers to put an "order an Uber" feature in their own apps.
Button makes money on any transaction that is done through its system. Besides Uber, Button has struck up partnerships with Resy, on-demand hair styling startup Glamsquad, and others.
Jaconi - an entrepreneur whose cloud-based, loyalty rewards company FreeCause was acquired by Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten a few years ago - has a small but talented team of e-commerce veterans whose past experiences include working for Rocket Internet, Google, Venmo, and JP Morgan.
Jaconi told Business Insider he's looking to grow his team with the new funding.
"The partnerships we've signed, our execution, and the caliber of the team we've assembled has brought us this far. Our second chapter starts now," Jaconi said in Thursday's announcement.