| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | 2010, San Francisco, California, USA |
| Founder(s) | Christopher Boone Rick DeGolia |
| Headquarters | Silicon Valley, California, USA |
| Key people | Christopher Boone (Founder, President & CEO) Rick DeGolia (Founder, Executive Chairman) Dan Kikinis (CTO) Perry Gregg (VP Engineering) |
| Website | www.cimbal.com |
Cimbal Inc. is an independent software vendor located in San Francisco, USA. It develops and markets the mobile payment and promotion solution Cimbal which allows users in the United States to make and accept secure electronic payments through mobile devices and to receive targeted merchant and manufacturer promotional offers.
The payment solution can be used in stores, online, and person to person. The promotion component of Cimbal allows merchants to display nearby users deals on their mobile devices. The payment solution and the promotion solution work with near field communication. Alternatively, the user scans a two-dimensional barcode with a mobile device.
Cimbal is integrated into a merchant point-of-sale system or online shopping cart and requires no terminal or card reader hardware. The software works on devices with GPS and a camera, typically a smartphone. It is available for the mobile operating systems iOS and Android.
Mobile payment options include transactional accounts, debit cards, or credit cards as funding. Software security features include multi-factor authentication, end-to-end encryption, and dynamic tokenization.
The service was conceived in 2008 by Christopher Boone and launched in 2010. Cimbal's founders had previously worked together at the image-based search engine Visuvi. [1] After exiting Visuvi, Boone and members of the Visuvi team founded Cimbal.
Their goal was to turn a mobile device into a scanner capable of reading information-rich barcodes from computer monitors, terminal readers, paper invoices, billboards, newspapers, television, or other mobile devices.
Cimbal is funded by angel investors and the management team. In January 2011, the company has been selected as a finalist for Red Herring's Global 100 award. [2] According to Aite Group, mobile bill payments will reach USD 214 billion in gross dollar volume in 2015. [3]