Peppercoin, the micropayments startup founded/backed by Ronald Rivest, has changed its CEO: Perry Solomon, the founding CEO, has been demoted to being “VP of strategy” at the company. Bob Kiburz, a veteran billing executive formerly with Lucent, has been appointed as the new CEO.
This comes as the Boston-based company is set to announce its first institutional round of funding early next week. This latest round follows an angle round of $1.7 million, announced in February earlier this year.
The company responded to queries with this formal statement: “Perry will continue with the company as a key member of the executive team…the expansion of the executive team is concomitant with the new funding, which will allow us to expand all of Peppercoin’s operations. Bob Kiburz has an outstanding track record of success in managing high growth organizations, and we are very pleased to have been able to attract him.”
Technically, the company is still in beta and will have a full launch next month.
Micropayments sector of late has seen a slew of activity, with startups like Peppercoin, BitPass and Paystone entering the market, and Apple’s success with selling individual songs. Of course, other established content commerce players also offer micropayments, as part of their suite of services.
Update: eContent Mag has the formal release now: it has raised $4 million in first round, from POD Holding and private investors.
Update 2: eContentMag pulled down the link: apparently the release sent out by the company was embargoed until next week, but the site/newsletter mixed it up. Peppercoin PR rep told me that the figure of funding in the initial release is not completely accurate. I never had the release, so I am just reporting on what others had.
Related:
– Peppercoin earlier funding news
– Ron Rivest Suggests Probability-Based Micropayments
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