Ribbon was a

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

payments

startup A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to ...

that lets users sell online using a shortened URL that can be shared across email, social media and a seller's own website. The service focuses on bring integrated checkouts directly to platforms like

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

, and

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

letting buyers purchase without leaving those services. The company graduated from a

startup accelerator Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components, and (sometimes) culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubato ...

called

AngelPad AngelPad is an American seed-stage startup incubator, launched in September 2010 by Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas with six other former Google employees as mentors. AngelPad provides mentorship, seed money, and networking at two 10-week cours ...

as "Kout" in October 2011 and subsequently raised $1.6 million from

Tim Draper Timothy Cook Draper (born June 11, 1958) is an American venture capital investor, and founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ),

through

Draper Associates Timothy Cook Draper (born June 11, 1958) is an American venture capital investor, and founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ),

Naguib Sawiris Naguib Onsi Sawiris ( ; ; born 15 June 1954) is an Egyptian businessman. Sawiris is chairman of Weather Investments's parent company, and the former chairman and CEO of Orascom Telecom Holding and Orascom Investment Holding S.A.E. Early li ...

Emil Michael Emil G. Michael ( ; born September 19, 1972) is an Egyptian-born American businessman. Michael was previously the senior vice president of business and chief business officer at Uber, and the chief operating officer of Klout. In December 2 ...

, Gokul Rajaram, and others bringing its total raised amount to $1.75 million.

Twitter shutdown

On April 10, 2013, the company announced support for "in-stream" payments on Twitter, allowing buyers to purchase items without leaving the Twitter.com stream.

shut down Ribbon's API access after approximately an hour and a half, according to Head of Business Development, Daniel Brusilovsky. Ribbon requested permission to show video cards, but after receiving permission then switched the

url A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

to show the hacked checkout system. The company wrote a statement announcing they will revert to showcasing only a summary of their product without the ability to do in-stream payments."An Update on Ribbon and Twitter"
Ribbon Blog As of April 11, 2013 Ribbon links inside Twitter no longer work in-stream and buyers are redirected to purchase on the Ribbon website.

References

External links

Official Ribbon website

Official Ribbon Blog
Online retailers of the United States Companies based in San Francisco American companies established in 2011 Internet properties established in 2011 2011 establishments in California {{US-internet-company-stub