Mica
A modern payment network offering faster, secure, and cost-effective transactions between consumers, retailers, and financial institutions.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | €0.0 | round | |
* | $10.0m | Early VC | |
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
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Mica.io is a financial technology firm that has developed a modern payment infrastructure designed to facilitate secure, flexible, and cost-effective transactions. Founded in 2020 by Christopher Petersen, the company is headquartered in Austin, Texas. The leadership team, including Christopher Petersen, boasts extensive experience with multiple startup exits in the payments sector, at companies like Google, PayPal, and Microsoft.
The core of Mica's platform is its patented credential-less payment technology, which aims to eliminate fraud. Instead of traditional 16-digit card numbers, the system uses a "Universally Unique Ephemeral Key" (UUEK) for each transaction. This key is temporary and statistically impossible to duplicate, rendering intercepted data useless for fraudulent activities. This approach is designed to prevent issues like account takeover fraud that affect the payments industry. The infrastructure is built to be secure by design, offering a more robust alternative to legacy payment rails.
The company serves a wide range of clients, including retailers, banks, fintech companies, consumers, loyalty providers, and crypto exchanges. Mica's business model is versatile, providing infrastructure for various use cases such as online, in-app, and in-store payments, peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, bill payments, and closed-loop systems. Its technology is agnostic to the type of value being exchanged, supporting fiat currency, crypto, loyalty points, and digital coupons. Additional platform features include SKU-level adjudication, age verification, and the ability to embed digital coupon redemptions and interactive digital receipts directly within the transaction flow. Mica has secured significant financial backing from investors including Intercontinental Exchange, Moonshots Capital, and MaQro Advisors.
Keywords: payment infrastructure, credential-less payments, fintech, payment security, fraud prevention, account linking, payment network, transaction security, UUEK, ephemeral key, digital receipts, multi-tender transactions, P2P payments, closed-loop payments, retail payments, bank technology, crypto exchange payments, loyalty program payments, Christopher Petersen