UPDATED 14:54 EDT / SEPTEMBER 22 2011

Stealthy Startup Raises Funding, Talks of Upcoming Offering

New York-based stealth startup Dashlane secured an impressive $5 million in a first round of funding.  VC firms Rho Ventures and FirstMark Capital co-led the financing, and execs from both companies are joining Dashlane’s board of directors. Dashlane co-founder Bernard Liautaud, a venture capitalist who also co-founded and led Business Objects (up until HP acquired it for almost $7 billion), also participated in the round.

Habib Kairouz, managing partner at Rho Ventures, and Rick Heitzmann, managing director of FirstMark Capital will sit on Dashlane’s board along with Liautaud and chief executive Emmanuel Schalit.

Dashlane is still working on its offering, but while there are not many details available, the company has said it’s focusing on online and mobile payments.  The concept revolves around simplifying online and m-commerce by improving overall user experience and eliminating the whole process of having to fill in your data when making an online transaction. This naturally involves a very strong security element that may have a lot of potential if it proves to be a good fit in this space, though this funding round can already be considered as a positive indicator of Dashlane’s direction.

Dashlane is the latest company to venture into the online transaction market, following a number of other startups as well as bigger players such as Visa, and Google. The latter just launched Google Wallet, a mobile payments project that will soon enable customers of all 3 major credit card companies to pay with their phones.

Offline and online payment methods are slowly merging into one. Capital One for example strengthened its existing ties with social game developer Zynga: gamers who will open an account at the bank now have access to several perks such as a FarmVille breedable goat.


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