Corduro's challenge will be to explain all the options it offers to merchants, and to win mindshare in the increasingly crowded mobile payments market.
"Many companies exist in a crowded international payments market today, but none have been able to distill the complexities of the space into an easy solution," said Melissa Widner, general partner, NAB Ventures, in a statement.
For those who have a hard time understanding exactly where Dwolla fits in the crowded mobile payments market where services like Square, Venmo, Google Wallet and PayPal get all the press, the difference is this: Dwolla is primarily a payments network, not a tool for enabling payments through the existing credit card network.
In the increasingly crowded mobile payment card-reader space, it's not just technology that's being cloned.
Investors appear to be concerned about the San Francisco company's ability to distinguish itself in a crowded field of payment services that includes PayPal, American Express, Visa, Google and Apple.
In the increasingly competitive and crowded world of mobile payments, Square stands out.
It is rare for a start-up company working in a highly competitive and crowded market like mobile payments to stay in test mode for so long, at the risk of having rivals overtake it.
It's hard to stand out in the increasingly crowded field of mobile payments.
Yet, while this "fustercluck" draws most of the headlines, there's an equally large opportunity on the slightly-less-crowded side of the "mobile payments" market: Bill pay.
Every carrier and credit card company seems to have its own system, the space is fragmented, crowded and no standard for payment mechanisms has emerged.
