Why ORNG's founder pivoted from college food ordering to real-time money transfer
Alex Parmley has been thinking about building his latest company, ORNG, since he was working on his last company, Phood.
Alex Parmley has been thinking about building his latest company, ORNG, since he was working on his last company, Phood.
Launched in 2018, Phood was a payments app that let students use dining dollars to order food from third-party apps and merchants anywhere in the world. It built the first campus-integrated debit card and worked with colleges across the nation, such as UT-Austin.
Parmley discovered firsthand the long and boring process of moving money as a business owner. He recalled it could take 15 to 30 days for vendors to receive the actual dining dollars from the universities after students ordered. This meant the company had to raise millions in a debt facility to pay those vendors while waiting for payment from the universities to process. As inflation rates rose and debt borrowing became expensive, this made running Phood expensive.
Parmley started wishing for a product that could let money transfer in real time, real fast. He was also ready for a change and knew that if he stayed in the market, there was a possibility his company would be squeezed out. So, after six years of running Phood, he took a big swing. He pivoted the company’s business, renamed the whole thing ORNG, and started pitching the financial contacts he made while building Phood on a bigger, more expansive idea.
“Our product is a network that lets money move instantly and safely across countries,” he told TechCrunch about ORNG. “Kind of like sending a message but for enterprises.”
On Friday, ORNG officially came out of stealth mode with a few clients, including publicly traded ones, though he declined to go into detail.
ORNG works with banks, fintech companies, and large businesses that need quick and easy payments. He said right now, each country has its own way of handling fast money transfers but the platforms they use don’t always work with the platforms other countries use. This can cause a headache and financial delay — similar to how those small businesses had to wait days for the university to pay them.
“Our method brings all these systems into one easy-to-use API,” Parmley said, adding that this means businesses can handle payments worldwide through one platform. “We’re not just making things faster; we’re making them simpler. Stripe increased the GDP of the internet; we want to increase the cash flow.”
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