Jim McKelvey

Square Inc is a company booming in the realm of financial technology and services. The company was founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009. Started off as a company to help small retailers and vendors accept credit cards but slowly ITV started expanding and broadened its customer base to big enterprises as well. The company’s headquarters is based in San Francisco, California and it is one of the largest companies in the financial technology sectors across the globe. So, let’s have a look at where it all began.

The Founding Story of Square Inc

Before co-founding Square Inc with Jim McKelvey, Jack Dorsey served as the CEO of Twitter. He stepped down from the position to establish Square Inc. The main idea behind founding this company was to make credit cards with tech that will be able to transmit data through the headphone jack of a smartphone.

To get the company up and running, both of them needed funding from investors. Since the co-founders hailed from a highly rich professional background, they were able to raise a total of $10 million in Series A funding. Some of the investors include Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) and Marissa Mayer (former CEO of Yahoo!). After receiving this funding, Square Inc developed its first product which was a square-shaped credit card reader. So, after a year of establishment, Square Inc rolled out its first product and also launched an app for both iOS and Android.

The company eventually started booming as it witnessed transactions worth millions of dollars every week. So, the co-founders decided to conduct another round of funding in January 2011. The money raised in this round was $27.5 million and the net valuation of the company became $230 million. During this time, Visa bought a small stake in the company.

Growth of Square Inc

In the early months of 2011, the company processed around $3 million per day. Seeing the number of users increasing per day, Square Inc made a deal with Apple so that the devices of the company are sold at Apple Stores. This increased the visibility of the brand and attracted more investors. After the next funding round, the valuation of the company became $1 billion. So, a young brand became a billion-dollar company within a span of three years and that was just the early days.

Since Square focused mainly on retailers, businesses, and small vendors, it built a lot of apps over the years to enhance digital payment processing, creating online stores, etc. One of the best services provided by Square Inc is Square Capital which analyzes data from merchant’s sales and provides advance loans using Square’s credit card processor. With the services provided by Square Inc, more businesses were able to create an online presence. In 2012, the company hosted Series D funding and raised $200 million and after two years it conducted Series E making a total worth of Square Inc $6 billion.

Uncertain Times

The company was making good money but its partnership with Starbucks led to a huge monetary loss. The company also went through some turmoil in 2015 when it was planning to file an IPO. During this time, Jack Dorsey became the interim CEO of Twitter and he had to handle both companies at the same time. So, after Square Inc started trading as a public company, the share prices dropped at the beginning and for one year the journey was a bit rocky.

Though the company lost millions in the partnership with Starbucks and found it difficult to trade as a public company after a year it was all getting back on track. From 2017 the company started recovering from its failure and decided to go international by expanding its services in the UK market. Given that the shares of Square were falling in 2016, the shares grew to 150% in 2018. In time, the company has also made a few acquisitions like Weebly and most recently gained majority ownership in Tidal.

About the Founders

Jack Dorsey is mostly famous as he served as the CEO and co-founder of Twitter. He went to New York University but dropped out before graduating. He started working on the idea of Twitter while he was a student at NYU.

Jim McKelvey is an American billionaire famous for co-founding Square Inc. He went to Washington University at St Louis and after graduating started working as a contractor for IBM.