Originally published in TechCrunch

Today, The Dallas Business Journal is reporting that ModoPayments completed a $2 Million funding round by a group of individual angels that includes Tim Keith, John Beletic, and Jay Kassing among others.

We first reported on ModoPayments way back in 2011 when they were still primarily focused on building a mobile payments platform for store merchants to monetized location check-ins.

A lot has changed for the Richardson, TX startup since those salad days and they quietly launched a very interesting product last fall called their Digital Payments Hub. This hub is a Swiss Army Knife of “moving value” between and along multiple financial systems—legacy systems and new systems.

Value could be defined as money, but it could also be things like loyalty points or coupons. The Digital Payments Hub uses a proprietary, secure data container called a COIN™ (not to be confused with the modular payment card for which Modo’s patent precedes by several years) to move the value/data along their network.

It’s complicated but the “explainer” video at ModoPayments’s website does a great job of metaphorically displaying how the system works in the background.

I spoke with Founder and CEO Bruce Parker this afternoon about their pivot to this larger backend integration product and he explained the transition as such:

“We spent a few years chasing the mobile payments dragon, and came to the conclusion we didn’t have much to add to the discussion about the new digital user experiences. We are, however, extraordinary payments plumbers. So we decided to help solve the problems of integrating existing payments systems to the digital ecosystem.”