Billpoint was the name of a person-to-person

money transfer service In the legal code of the United States, a money transmitter or money transfer service is a business entity that provides money transfer services or payment instruments. Money transmitters in the US are part of a larger group of entities called m ...

founded in 1998, and purchased in 1999 by online auctioneer

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

History

Billpoint was founded in 1998 by S. Young Lee, Hope Chen, Will Chen, Jason May, Ian Flint and Jay Shen, with headquarters in

Redwood City, California Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California's Bay Area, approximately south of San Francisco, and northwest of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people to being a ...

. The company obtained venture funding from Sequoia Capital in February 1999, and later that year was purchased by

; its website was taken offline while integration into eBay's auction service took place. It reappeared in 2000 when it was relaunched as a joint venture with

Wells Fargo Wells Fargo & Company is an American multinational financial services company with corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California; operational headquarters in Manhattan; and managerial offices throughout the United States and intern ...

bank.Eric M. Jackson. ''The PayPal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, And the Rest of Planet Earth'' (World Ahead Publishing, 2006) . During this interval, online payment service

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

was launched, rapidly becoming popular with eBay's customers. Billpoint and eBay spent much of the next two years trying to overtake PayPal, but with mixed results. In July 2002,

CEO

Meg Whitman Margaret Cushing Whitman (born August 4, 1956) is the US ambassador to Kenya, an American business executive and former gubernatorial candidate for California. She is a board member of Procter & Gamble and General Motors. Whitman was previously ...

agreed to the acquisition of PayPal with its CEO

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in F ...

. When the deal was closed in October 2002, eBay began the process of phasing out Billpoint. The shutdown was completed in early 2003.

References

EBay Financial services companies established in 1998 Financial services companies disestablished in 2003 Online financial services companies of the United States Payment service providers 1999 mergers and acquisitions Defunct financial services companies of the United States {{money-stub