 Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelley, this is AWS re-invent and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Wikibons. Continuous wall-to-wall coverage of this event. This is our flagship production. We go out to the events, as you know. We extract the signal from the noise. Bring you the people that really are part of the ecosystem, the executives at the hosting company, the practitioners, the customers that are actually using the technologies to try to paint a picture for you, our audience, what's happening at this show. Tim Saunders is here, he is the CTO and co-founder of CardFlight, a mobile payment platform. Tim, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thanks, Dave, and Jeff, thanks for having us today. Yeah, so AWS re-invent, were you here last year at re-invent? I know this is our first time being here and yeah, very excited to be here. Yeah, us too, we didn't have theCUBE here last year. We did, in June, we did the AWS Summit at Moscone, it's quite an event, what's the vibe for you guys? Yeah, it's great, like we're one of AWS's customers. So as a startup, it's great to be a part of some of the sessions. We're going to re-architect some of our system after being in some of the boot camps and sessions, so it's been very helpful for us as a company, architecturally, on the back end. I mean, you got to love that, the way that AWS gives back to the startups that have been helping it get off the ground, right, good visibility. We've seen tons of startups in sessions up on the stage, I mean, alongside with the big companies like Netflix, which you'd expect, but that's good, so how have you taken advantage of that? It's just in terms of some of the sessions that you've been doing, some of the action coming on theCUBE. Yep, yeah, well, so part of our push for our companies, we're going to become PCI compliant, so we process our credit card data, so some of the sessions have really helped around security, encryption, and making PCI compliance really easy and simple for us to run. So talk a little bit about CardFlight and some of the trends that are driving your industry. Yeah, so CardFlight, we make mobile payments really simple and easy for developers to get mobile payments up and running within their custom applications. So three easy steps with CardFlight. The first one is we provide like a piece of hardware, hold that right up. Magnetic and Crypto Magstrat Reader allows us to integrate that inside your own custom application. We provide an SDK with a few lines of code you can integrate into our reader. We estimate under an hour for you to get mobile payments up and running, and thirdly, on our back end, we connect with over 23 different payment processes, so it allows us to be that middleware player in between your custom application and payment processes, which people have come to love over the years. So the hardware just connects to the audio socket of... Yeah, currently our first version of our hardware connects directly to our audio jacket. We're in the process of looking at a few other versions, but yeah. Okay, so mobile payments obviously, big shift, really disruptive in the industry. Talk about that disruption, talk about the drivers in your business. Yeah, so obviously payments in general is a massive industry. I think e-commerce over the last decade has been a massive industry, but obviously mobile trend is definitely becoming a huge sector in mobile payments, and we really feel that there's a market there, and you can see from some of our competitors and several other people in the same space that mobile payments is really taking off in the years to come. So talk about how you're different from, say, Square. So the thing with Square is we really love Square, they're a great company. The only thing is that with Square that you have to use their app, you use their reader, and you have to use their back-end payment processor. So there's no customization outside of that with Square. You have to use their app, their reader, and their back-end processing system, which is great for an SMB business. If you're selling at a food store, or selling art out in the back of your trunk, that's really great for those sort of vendors. But if you're a mid-sized, leveled business, and you have a custom application which allows you to process mobile payments, Square doesn't really offer that as part of their solution. So that's where we really find our niche market is allowing developers to integrate mobile payments really simple and really easy inside their applications. So it's all about the SDK and being able to customize that. So why did you guys start CardFlight? It should have started there. So we had another startup, which we were previously working on, my co-founder and I, and we were trying to look around for a solution exactly like CardFlight. Like we said, I could find great solutions for SMB out-of-the-box solutions, and I could find solutions for top and high-end companies, tier-one merchants. But I couldn't find nothing which was easy to integrate, seamlessly integrate as a developer, which is cheap and simple for me to get up and running really quickly. So we basically hacked up on a weekend an SDK and we thought, well, hey, it really feels like there's a business here to be made. So that's how we became CardFlight. So we pivoted from our existing company to become CardFlight. So Tim, I'm checking out your website and I'm looking at some of the customers you've got, Event Farm, LearnVest and some others. Maybe could you walk us through maybe a customer example and talk about the thing I'm interested in is you mentioned being able to integrate with their own application. Why is that so important? What's the value of that beyond what something like Square does where you're not able to do that? How does that deliver value for somebody like Event Farm or LearnVest or other customers? Yeah, so someone like Event Farm, or we have several event management companies, they're basically selling tickets at their events and they have an iPad service. And so they have a custom application which they've built themselves, which is looks and feel like Event Farm. And so CardFlight has allowed them to stay with inside their own app to process those payments without having to switch to another application like Square or Intuit or one of those other companies which offer that. So it allows a company like Event Farm which is to have a consumer-facing iPad solution. So customers can stay in that one app, have the same look and feel with inside their app and process the card present payments there and then. So I mean, it sounds like one of the benefits being just the way you present your company. You've got this, it's branded with your company's, you know, it's your own application. It almost gives it a little bit more of that professional feel. Is that one of the benefits and I understand that correctly? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, like our target market is mid-level businesses, companies that have their own custom app. However, their core competency isn't focusing on mobile payments, encryption, end-to-end encryption, PCI compliance, security. We factor that all out for those businesses as a service. So we allow them to process card present payments inside their apps and get that up and running really quickly and really simple. So let's shift a little bit to AWS. So are you guys at this point completely on AWS? What's kind of the state of your infrastructure right now? Yeah, so we started out with one of Amazon's competitors, AWS's competitors. And one of our huge factors with CardFlight is security and PCI compliance. So we went on a bit of a journey as a development team to work out the best cloud solution for PCI compliance. Handling PCI compliance for a startup is a huge deal in itself. So we wanted to find the best cloud server which allowed us to reduce our scope down to the smallest amount of PCI compliance scope and the amount of effort as us developers to focus on what we do well, which is mobile payments. And for the cloud server to focus on what they do well, which is PCI compliance. So we went on a fact-finding mission. We found that Amazon AWS allowed us to leverage a lot of their infrastructure and processes for PCI compliance. There's nothing we had to set up or no NDA we had designed. It was just out-of-the-box solution for us for PCI compliance. AWS have the shared responsibility model. So it really allowed us to factor out the PCI compliance scope down to as small as possible unit of work for us as a startup. So for our audience members who might not be that familiar with PCI compliance, can you kind of explain a little bit about what that is and what makes that difficult? Then you mentioned that shared responsibility model with Amazon, can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so PCI compliance is a standard which every company that basically processes credit card data, whether it be mag stripe data, encrypted or decrypted data, has to be certified by this long list of rules that you got certain passwords, need to be reset. You got logging of firewall transactions. You got logging as the whole massive document list of rules. And it's a standard for companies that are processing credit card data and allows us to say that we're secure. Your credit card information is going to be released to other companies that hopefully we don't get infiltrated in that sort of way. So it's really helped, PCI really helps the company be a standard of level and saying, yep, we're PCI, we purchase your credit card data and we're seen as a standard which the industry is renowned for. And so with AWS it's really allowed us to, with their shared responsibility model is that AWS focuses on a lot of their infrastructure, a lot of their process. So we've factored out our system into three different sections, our API section, our web section and our PCI compliance section. And our PCI compliance section focused on our credit card data processing. So with the shared responsibility, it's allowed us to, you know, spawn up AMIs, allow them to process them into different availability zones and different regions around the world. And for us to scale up and down really quickly using that shared responsibility so that we know that a massive section of our system is already checked off for PCI compliance. It's not another thing for our QSA auditors to have to focus on, we already know out of the box that it's already past PCI compliance. And for a startup that's brilliant, you know, for us to spend hours of time focusing on other sections which already has been covered, it's been great. So tell us more about the company. Where are you guys at? I mean, how'd you get funding and where are you at with funding? What's the head count? Yeah, so we're a New York based startup. Even though my accent's Australian, we're a New York based and we're a team of seven of us, shouldn't be eight, start of the year. And yeah, we're a seed stage funded startup. And yeah, we're basically booting out our products for the next 12 months and basically proving our business model. We believe there's a massive market there for us in the industry. And yeah, we're excited for what the future holds. So you haven't started doing an A round raise? No, so we're probably looking at doing a series A probably this time next year sometime. So we're currently in what we call a private beta phase. So we want to have great folks on great customer support, making sure we're ironing out some of the major issues with our system and just ensuring a really seamless process for developers to get up and running really quickly, onboard them inside their mobile applications. And the early customers that you've approached or have approached you, sort of recognize some of the limitations of existing platforms, want to do that level of customization. So what's their feedback been so far? Yeah, so we have several hundred developers on our pipeline of wanting to use a solution like Carb Flight. And a lot of their feedback has been, you know, we want a custom ability to process mobile payments inside our app. And you know, they're very excited that finding that there's a solution like this. And it allows our company to integrate with the existing payment processes that they already have. So they don't need to go away and use a separate payment processor, but let's say they're already using First Data or TISAs as their payment processor. We already integrate with them. So there's no need for them to go away and do a separate transaction with another payment processor. So we've had great feedback, you know, since we've been launched about six, nine months ago. So yeah, we're really excited for the customers we've got on board and yeah. So Tim, my partner John Furry's been asking people all week if they had to put a bumper sticker on this show, you know, reinvent 2013, what would it be? And so I'll ask you what, from your standpoint, you know, first time at Reinvent, obviously a lot of buzz here, a lot of developers, a lot of innovation. I think you've seen some of the keynotes, I'm not sure if you saw this morning, but what's your bumper sticker for Reinvent 2013? I think my bumper sticker would be the best is yet to come. It's really, really believing that Reinvent's innovative, pushing the boundaries of some of the cloud space. And I really believe the best is yet to come for AWS. As a company, we believe we want to leverage some of that, the stuff that is to come. Some of the announcement this weekend is really going to help us as a company, as we grow and scale. So we really believe, you know, if there was a bumper sticker, it would say the best is yet to come. That's a good one. Yeah, so it's early days here, we've been covering this, and we've talked a lot about, you know, the trillion dollar market opportunity that Amazon's going after. So they're just barely scratching that surface. We're estimating, you know, three to four billion this year. So it's a long way to go. So Tim, good luck, congratulations, you know, getting off the ground and having what appears to be a very successful pivot. We'll be watching, and thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, thank you very much, Jeff and Dave and theCUBE. And yeah, thank you for letting us be a part of it. It was great, thank you. Okay, keep it right there, everybody. We're back with our next guest. We're live from Las Vegas. This is Reinvent 2013, and this is theCUBE.