Paydiant, a new Boston-based mobile payments venture, today announced that it closed a $7.6M round of funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners. The investment will be used to accelerate product development, sales and marketing for Paydiant, which plans to formally launch later this year.

The company was co-founded by Chris Gardner, Kevin Laracey and Joe Paratore — three proven entrepreneurs in the e-billing, payments and mobile space that have collaborated before.

All three have significant early-stage and public company experience, having founded or played key roles in companies that were pioneers in both online and mobile payments, and other emerging markets. Jim Moran, General Partner at North Bridge and John Simon, Managing Director at General Catalyst have joined Paydiant’s Board of Directors.

“Enabling consumers to use their phones to make everyday purchases is a huge market opportunity,” said Chris Gardner, co-founder of Paydiant. “We have assembled a team who understand both the business and technology issues that must be addressed to create new mobile payments offerings for broad adoption.

This group has hands-on experience creating and operating successful online and mobile platforms that facilitate billions of dollars in payments for many of the world’s largest companies today. We are fortunate to partner with North Bridge and General Catalyst who also have deep expertise in both mobile and payment technologies.”

Laracey was co-founder and CEO of edocs, the leading online billing and payments company that was acquired by Siebel Systems (now part of Oracle) in 2005. At Siebel, he was the general manager of its self-service solutions group. Most recently, Laracey was a venture partner at Sigma Partners.

Gardner also worked at edocs where he served as vice president of products and marketing. After the acquisition by Siebel, he became the senior vice president of products and marketing at m-Qube, North America’s leading premium SMS mobile payments provider that was acquired by Verisign in 2006. Most recently, Gardner was the chief marketing officer at ExtendMedia, a digital media content delivery and commerce platform software company that was acquired by Cisco in 2010.

Joe Paratore was edocs’ vice president of engineering and technical services. After the acquisition by Siebel, he joined Gardner at m-Qube as the company’s senior vice president of technology operations. Paratore continued with Verisign and managed a large global staff and eight data centers as the general manager and vice president of technical operations and customer care for Verisign’s mobile payments and mobile messaging businesses.

Source: MarketWire