Venmo is a 📝PayPal product that lets people send and request money from a mobile app, used most often to split bills, rent, and shared expenses, with payments shown in a social feed alongside a short note. Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail founded it in 2009 as a text-message payment service; early backers included angel investor 📝Sam Lessin and 📝Greycroft, and 📝Braintree acquired it in 2012 for $26.2 million before PayPal bought Braintree in 2013. It has since grown from free peer-to-peer transfers into cards, merchant checkout, and business payments, and competes with 📝Zelle and Cash App. Venmo is available only in the United States, serving consumers, small sellers, and teens through parent-managed accounts.
Key Features
- Social Feed — Payments carry a short note or emoji and appear in a feed of friends' activity, with privacy settings that can limit any payment to only the people involved in it.
- Venmo Debit and Credit Cards — A debit card spends the Venmo balance wherever cards are accepted, and a Venmo credit card issued by Synchrony earns cash back on top spending categories.
- Pay with Venmo — A checkout option at participating online and in-app merchants, offered through PayPal's merchant tools, that lets shoppers pay from their balance, bank, or card.
- Business Profiles — Separate profiles for small sellers and side businesses that accept customer payments for a per-transaction fee, keeping sales apart from personal payments.
Getting Started
- Download the Venmo app for iOS or Android and sign up with a US phone number and email.
- Link a US bank account, debit card, or credit card as the funding source for payments.
- Find friends by name, username, phone number, or QR code, then send or request money.
- Set default payment privacy to Private, Friends, or Public in the app's privacy settings.