Jessica Guynn of the Los Angeles Times interviewed Square COO Keith Rabois about Square’s latest round of funding,  which according to some sources puts the company valuation at over $240 million. According to Rabois, the company has “been signing up 30,000 to 40,000 new accounts per month and the pace is accelerating.”  Not bad!

Square provides a  new platform to accept debit and credit cards on a mobile devices. The Square product is a small (square) piece of hardware that attaches to mobile devices (e.g., smartphone, laptop). It’s basically a small card reader that allows merchants to swipe a customer’s credit card and complete a mobile transaction from virtually anywhere.

Before the company launched, Square Inc. raised $10 million,  with a valuation of $40 million. The lead investor of the $10 million round was Khosla Ventures.

At first blush the current $240 million valuation may seem rich for an enterprise that launched just over a year ago, but given that one of the company’s co-founders is Jack Dorsey, best known as the creator of Twitter, a blockbuster success is not out of the question.

In the Los Angeles Times blog post, Guynn asks: “How do you increase awareness of Square?”

According to Dorsey, “Historically the way people have found out about Square is that they pay a merchant at the farmers market with it and decide they want to get it themselves or they read about it on Twitter or in media coverage. But we have not engaged in traditional marketing campaigns. We are going to invest in marketing. You will see that go live in January. It’s a big task to ensure that the 180 million people who carry plastic in their wallets know about Square.How has adoption of Square grown since October, when you launched to the public?We have been signing up 30,000 to 50,000 new accounts per month and the pace is accelerating.” (via: Lost Angeles Times)