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Silicon Valley Titans Think This New Stanford Grad Can Make Wallets Irrelevant

21-year-old Lucas Duplan raised the largest seed round ever for his mobile payments app.
Clinkle founder Lucas Duplan, via Clinkle

The rise of the smartphone has meant that we have, slowly but surely, had to carry around less and less stuff around with us. No more iPods. No more cameras. No more road maps.

And soon, we’ll be able to ditch our wallets, too. So promises Lucas Duplan, the creator of Clinkle, an app the fresh Stanford grad has been working on for the past two years. It’s a bold vision, one that’s eluded industry stalwarts like PayPal and Google Wallet.

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How will a 21-year-old achieve what has so far proven impossible? Well, it’s hard to say, mainly because the app isn’t even finished yet and Duplan won’t get into specifics‚beyond explaining that Clinkle will link to your credit cards and bank accounts by combining the functions of focused apps like Venmo and Square. Meanwhile, merchants won’t need any new hardware.

Clinkle

For now, Duplan only has a working prototype, but a successful local beta test at Stanford University has helped convince countless tech luminaries that Clinkle is the real deal, scoring the startup $25 million in initial funding. That's the largest seed round in Silicon Valley history, according to Business Insider, and a seemingly preposterous sum for a company with no final product.

The list of backers include brand names like Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Accel Partners' Jim Breyer, Intel, and former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta, among others, none of whom seem overly concerned that they’re betting on an app that has yet to launch and has no users.

"Our goal is to completely modernize how payments work," Duplan told Business Insider. "What we're trying to do is basically take your phone and have it for the first time be able to rival cash and credit cards. We've developed a way for consumers to download an app, no hardware needed, and achieve scale from a software point of view."

Taking a page from Facebook, Duplan plans to target students by launching at select colleges in the next few months.

Naturally, the payoff will be huge if Duplan ends up pulling this off. The last time Silicon Valley meaningfully disrupted the entrenched financial system, the result was PayPal, a company that helped set the platform for Web 2.0 and ignite the second great tech boom. Its founders and early employees, known affectionately as the PayPal Mafia, ended up having a hand in notable startups like YouTube, Yelp, LinkedIn, Zynga, Digg, Flickr, reddit, Square, and Kiva.org.

More recently, Elon Musk, a PayPal co-founder, would use his modest earnings to help send a privately created rocket to the International Space Station and build trendy electric cars.

Could Duplan join such illustrious company? It's far too early to tell, but his peers are convinced. Clinkle first made headlines in April when 20 Stanford students abruptly dropped out to join the cause, bringing the budding startup’s headcount to fifty. That's a dizzying number considering that until a few months ago Duplan had been working on this part-time, on top of his studies, which he had crammed into three years so that he could graduate early.

​@sfnuop