Last August, Silicon Alley darling Venmo, a mobile app that lets you split bills and pay friends, was acquired by Braintree, a PayPal competitor, for $26.2 million. At the time, Braintree emphasized the shift towards mobile commerce. And it looks like having a consumer-facing brand like Venmo is helping in that department.

Today, they announced the launch of Venmo Touch, which should help lower the barrier to buying things on mobile by avoiding the hassle of having to enter your credit card information with every new app . . . as long as it's part of the Braintree family.

Enter your credit card info on the TaskRabbit app (a Braintree client), for example, and an option pops up to "save card with Venmo." If you opt in to the service and then open the HotelTonight app (another Braintree client), it will ask if you want to use the same card on file. All you need to enter is the CVV code.

Of course, the mobile payments market is plagued by fragmentation. For example, how is the average consumer supposed to know that Best Buy and Walmart are on the same network, whereas Duane Reade is with Google Wallet and Starbucks is with Square?

Braintree has an advantage there because it happens to be a popular payment platform with the kind of apps you might actually make purchases on. Venmo Touch is debuting in private beta on HotelTonight, TaskRabbit, Wrapp, and more and Braintree expects that other clients like Uber, Fab, and Livingsocial will take advantage of it, as they have one-click check out.

Now that Venmo Touch has launched maybe cofounder Andrew Kortina can finally get some sleep?

Jon Carin rocks (Photo: wikipedia.org)

Brain Boost This morning, Braintree, a Chicago-based online payments company announced, a $35 million series B round of funding. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). By investing in Braintree, new investors join Accel Partners and others and the company’s total funding is now set at $70 million.

Braintree acquired the beloved bill splitting app, Venmo, back in August and has kept it independent so far. Braintree allows businesses to accept payments from costumers, but Venmo allows consumers to make payments to anyone. It's a natural fit for both parties.

Braintree's client list includes fast-growing startups like Uber, Fab.com, Airbnb, who use it, "through periods of rapid growth without disruption to their ability to accept payments," the company said in an email to Betabeat. They also name-checked competitors like Stripe and PayPal, noting that one "big difference is that merchants receive their funds typically in two days with Braintree, vs. seven days with Stripe."

Be A Fellow The New York City Economic Development Corporation is now accepting nominations for its third class of “NYC Venture Fellows.” Previous fellows of the program include Foursquare, Etsy, and Warby Parker. Winners will be set up with mentors like Ben Lerer and the President of MTV, Stephen Friedman, to guide them through the next stage of their business and to connect them to powerful insiders. Submissions are being accepted now and the deadline is November 30, 2012.

Trippy Ted Talk TEDxSiliconAlley 2012, will be held on December 3rd, at Terminal 5. "How to Create a Mind" author Ray Kurzweil will be headlining the event and thhere will be keynotes by Makerbot founder Bre Pettis and philosopher Francessca Ferrando. Pink Floyd keyboardist Jon Carin will perform some of his music live, which is sure to make this the first TED Talk that makes people want to spark up a joint.

Side Piece SideTour, the company that sends you on fun group adventures, has now expanded its efforts to Chicago. CEO and co-founder Vipin Goyal told VentureBeat that the company is now booking three SideTours a day and plans to launch their service in Washington D.C. by the end of the year. Private chef dinners and small group art tours are ready for the masses!

Buy Everything Now Landlord is a new game that uses Foursquare to let you "buy" any location that your adventurous checking-in heart desires. Owners of property get rent paid to them based off of the number of checkins to the venue, so that they can buy more property and expand their empire. We're going to rush out to Staten Island and buy out the entire island, so then we can come back to Manhattan and rule the world.

We Love Those Lady Pilgrims Hacksgiving, the Thanksgiving themed Hackathon, will take place on November 9-10^th. Technology and design firm, The Control Group, is putting the event with Hack'n Jill and it will be the first hackathon with NY Tech Meetup that has at least 50 percent females in attendance. You can register on Hack'n Jill's website. Startups in search of tech talent should try to cop a ticket, these ladies can code.

A Personal Assistant With Your Pepsi? Pepsi is partnering with TaskRabbit to bring an extra hour of the day to drinkers of their new soda, Pepsi Next. Over the next four weeks, the two companies are giving 200 people a dedicated TaskRabbit for one hour to tackle errands of their choosing. This can include waiting in line for something, cooking dinner, or a bunch of other really helpful things. TaskRabbits show up with a can of soda for you too which is a bonus if you're thirsty. All it takes to enter is a simple registration.

Like For Old Ladies, But Better If you're into planning your shopping trips from home snagging deals while you shop, Shopkick already had you covered. But if you're into browsing Sunday circulars, then the app's newest update will make you happy too. The app just got a complete redesign that now features themed lookbooks that resemble glossy coupon circulars. They should just partner with TLC and make "Extreme Shopkicking" already.

Watch Those Tweets Fly HootSuite just launched a new product for their Enterprise clients. It's called the HootSuite Command Center and it functions like a virtual situation room for all of your company's social media efforts. So ChartBeat for the Twitter and Facebook set? Every social media manager in New York just swooned.

Look Here Cheap Bros Buystand, a startup which uses a name-your-price model for active lifestyle goods, launches in beta today. Customers browse merchandise from from brands like Burton, Vans, and Puma, and then name what they want to pay. Buystand sets up the customer with a retailer willing to pay that price. Instead of using wholesale markdowns, the company gets to have sales on customers terms. Mark October 17th in your calendars as the days that outdoor bros started saving money.

Mr. Kortina (Photo: Twitter)

A source familiar the deal told Betabeat yesterday that Venmo, a New York City-based mobile app that lets you split bills with friends, is in the process of being acquired by Braintree, a Chicago-based online payments company and PayPal competitor. The New York Times broke the news this afternoon, reporting a $26.2 million acquisition price. On the company blog, Venmo said the deal closed in mid-June and that its payment-sharing service "will remain unaffected" and continue to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Venmo and Braintree share an investor, Palo Alto powerhouse Accel Partners, which also invested in Facebook.

The two startups do seem to be in the midst of a mutual appreciation society. Last week, Braintree's community manager Kristi Lynch tweeted, "I know it sounds weird, but the @Venmo app makes me wish I owed more people money." Two Venmo employees favorited the tweet.

Venmo was founded in Philadelphia in 2009 by two former college roommates, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismai. The duo eventually moved the company to New York City, where Venmo become one of the early stars in the city's growing tech orbit, embraced by early adopters for making it easier to split the cost of dinner, drinks, monthly cable bills--or any of the innumerable costs of urban life--over their phones. There were even cutesy, customizable receipts, eagerly tweeted out by the Alley in-crowd.

However, Venmo took awhile to introduce itself to the public and didn't emerge from private beta until this March, when it made the service available on iOS, Android and online. By that time, other players like PayPal and Square were aggressively angling for dominance in mobile payments, although not in the bill-splitting niche. Venmo raised a comparatively modest $1.2 million over the last three years, but from a number of notable investors. According to Crunchbase, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and RRE Ventures all participated in its 2010 seed round, along with Facebook mafiosos Dave Morin and Dustin Moskovitz. Last year, Venmo raised a Series A from existing investors Lerer and RRE, along with Greycroft Partners and Accel Partners.

The Times reports that Venmo's 23-person team will not relocate from New York City to Chicago, but will continue to operate out of the East Coast.

Braintree, which was founded in 2007, got a huge influx of cash last June when Accel Partners, which backs a number of mobile payments startups, plowed $34 million into the company. The Chicago startup powers online payments for businesses, providing a merchant account, payment gateway and credit card storage, all in compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. Accel partner Ryan Sweeney, who joined the startup's board, described the payments company as providing a core foundation for Braintree clients, a list that includes high-profile, fast-growth businesses like Airbnb, LivingSocial, OpenTable, Shopify, GitHub, 37Signals and more.

In a TechCrunch post about Accel's investment, Mr. Sweeney predicted that the online payments industry would "consolidate dramatically" as payments became bundled into other services. In the past few months, however, the industry seems to be marked by increased fragmentation, with everyone from Verizon to Walmart to AT&T rushing to offer their own app, grasping for a chance to lead the payments evolution.

Braintree signaled its interest in mobile--Venmo's playground from the start--back in February, when it released tools for mobile app developers that would let merchants accept payments within a smartphone or tablet app. TechCrunch reported that the new tools help developers "avoid PCI compliance issues by encrypting sensitive credit card data when it is entered by the user on their mobile device." When merchants pass encrypted data from their server to Braintree for processing, Braintree uses a private key to decrypt the information, thus keeping credit card data out of merchants' hands.

A number of mobile payments companies, including Venmo, which uses a 256-bit encryption, have run into compliance issues with an obscure, broadly written law called the the California Money Transmission Act. As BusinessInsider reported, even PayPal had trouble with the law before it was acquired by eBay. As of last month, Venmo, Square and Amazon all had applications pending with California's Department of Financial Institutions. (It's worth noting that Robert Oswald, a Braintree ecommerce consultant, is one of the 16 people who follow the question, "How concerned are Venmo investors that it is not registered as a money transmitter in every US state?" on Quora.)

As Venmo co-founder Andrew Kortina told Betabeat in March, unlike other payments startups that try to get vendors to sign up in order to increase distribution, Venmo has taken a different approach, relying on friends to encourage friends (the few you'd normally split a bill with) to sign up. PayPal is great for strangers, he argued, but Venmo is optimized for people you know and trust. Initially the startup, which was merely SMS-based--leveraging a user's phone contacts--covered credit card fees for its users as it slogged through the arduous process of interfacing directly with banks.

When it emerged from private beta, however, Venmo required new customers to make payments from their bank accounts (or their Venmo balance) if they wanted to use the service for free, otherwise users had pay Venmo a 3 percent fee for using a credit card after the first $500. In March, Venmo told us it was processing $10 million in transactions a month and growing 30 percent month-over-month. Mr. Kortina predicted Venmo would do $250 million in transaction volume this year. Not long after  the app was released to the public, Venmo stopped losing money on credit card transactions. As we wrote back then, "By Silicon Alley standards, that’s killing it."

This is a breaking story, we will update the post when we know more. 

Previously:

What’s a Little App Between Friends? Venmo Only Cares About You and the People You Split Lunch With

Hello Venmo! Peer-to-Peer Payments Startup Picks Up Steam

Cutesy Venmo Receipts Are Now a Thing