Clinkle/Facebook
Have you heard of a startup called Clinkle? Don’t be ashamed if you haven’t. Up until this morning, I hadn’t heard of Clinkle either. But, it’s getting a lot of buzz. Normally, this is expected for any new and exciting startup. What makes Clinkle unique, however, is that no one is exactly sure what it does. But, that hasn’t stopped some high profile players from investing in the startup.
Alright. That’s not entirely truthfully. We do know that Clinkle is a mobile payments startup based out of Palo Alto. It was founded by 22-year-old Lucas Duplan and has already been backed by Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Intel, Intuit, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Qualcomm co-founder Andrew Viterbi, VMWare co-founders Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum, Venrock Associates founding partner Peter Crisp, and Salesforce founder and CEO Mark Benioff. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, it was announced that Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson has joined the party.
But, wait. It gets bigger. Duplan has already raised $25 million in seed funding and has roughly 100,000 people signed up to download the app.
Duplan has achieved all this without unveiling the details of his service. It’s a secret, or something mysterious like that. In fact, Duplan recently stated that “We really want to make sure we test everything before we start hyping it,” in response to what exactly his payments app does. While it’s believed that the app will be a mobile wallet that won’t require hardware on the phone (i.e. no NFC chip), there’s some other tech wizardry that makes Clinkle revolutionary, supposedly.
Even though Duplan claims that he’s not “hyping” his product, he totally is. It’s generating some major hype. And, they just released an almost 2-minute long clip where the only thing that happens is people’s body parts start disappearing.
After a little bit of research, we’ve come up with the following conclusions.
1. Lucas Duplan has created something so revolutionary that some of the most respected investors and tech luminaries are chomping at the bit to get in on the ground floor. It’s such a genius product that it can’t be revealed yet, because our minds aren’t capable of handling such a life-altering app and our heads would collectively explode. Instead, we have to be eased into the awesomeness of Clinkle.
2. Duplan has a great idea, but he can’t make it a reality. So, he generates some buzz to entice prospective investors, and developers, to make his idea a reality.
3. Lucas Duplan is a 21st Century snake oil salesman. Actually, he could be the greatest snake oil salesman of all-time.
If you know anything about Clinkle, please drop us a comment. We really want to know why so many people are buying into this mysterious startup. And, do you plan on signing up, you know, just to find out what all the fuss is about?
