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"Des Moines-based payments startup\u00A0Dwolla\u00A0has raised a\u00A0$16.5 million series C round from Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from\u00A0Village Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Union Square Ventures.\u00A0With this cash infusion,\u00A0Dwolla tells us it plans to double its staff to 80 team members, open a new office in San Francisco and expand\u00A0its enterprise-focused services.\r\n\r\nIf you haven't used Dwolla before, it offers a service quite similar to PayPal, allowing users to send and receive payments with\u00A0very low fees.\u00A0We've written about Dwolla quite a bit over the past few years, covering everything from the company's partnerships with\u00A0school districts, to a hackathon where the first prize was a cow (seriously).\r\n\r\nDwolla has lately gone after much of PayPal's own selling points with perks like\u00A0wider-reaching\u00A0mass payments.\u00A0Unfortunately, even with additional funding, Dwolla tells us it has no plans yet to expand outside the US.\r\n\r\nThe core product is also not changing as a result of these new funds. Instead, today's news is all about scale.\r\nScaling Dwolla\r\nThe company says it has never had a marketing budget before \u2014 now, new initiatives are in place to put Dwolla in front of more consumers.\r\n\r\nAs for\u00A0FiSync, a product developed by Dwolla which\u00A0brings real-time payments to\u00A0financial institutions like banks (in competition with\u00A0ACH), Dwolla tells us it doesn't have enough staff &amp;quot;to serve all the interest that's coming in.&amp;quot; Clearly, new hires will help ease this transition.\u00A0Right now, only one financial institution publicly uses\u00A0FiSync, but Dwolla tells us that &amp;quot;there are a multitude of financial institutions in various phases of integrating FiSync.&amp;quot;\r\n\r\nFor consumers, it seems the key weakness of Dwolla's service still lies in its smaller size \u2014 PayPal is clearly still the default online payments network. Today's news reflects how Dwolla hopes to rectify this issue, and with just 25 cent fees, I'm personally hoping the service can scale securely and pull through.\r\n\r\nImage credit:\u00A0Christa Richert"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/30/dwolla-raises-16-5m-from-andreessen-horowitz-to/>