Clinkle

Clinkle was a Silicon Valley mobile-payments startup founded in 2012 by Stanford student Lucas Duplan. In 2013 it raised roughly $30 million in what was then reported as the largest seed round in history, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Marc Benioff, Accel's Jim Breyer, Richard Branson, and Intel Capital. The company promised a phone-to-phone payments technology but never shipped a viable product, launched a poorly received "Treats" debit-card app, cycled through multiple pivots and leadership turmoil, and lost its window to Venmo and Apple Pay. By 2016 Clinkle had quietly shut down with no official announcement. It is retained in the API Evangelist network as a defunct a16z portfolio lead; it publishes no live website, developer portal, documentation, or API surface today (clinkle.com resolves to a suspended-account page).

Clinkle is profiled on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Company, Payments, Mobile Payments, FinTech, and Peer To Peer Payments.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Source on GitHub

5.7/100 minimal ▬ flat Agent 0/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5

0 APIs

CompanyPaymentsMobile PaymentsFinTechPeer To Peer PaymentsDefunctStartup

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5

Composite quality — 5.7/100 · minimal

Contract Quality 0.0 / 25

Developer Ergonomics 0.0 / 20

Commercial Clarity 0.0 / 20

Operational Transparency 0.0 / 13

Governance 0.0 / 12

Discoverability 6.8 / 10

Agent readiness — 0/100 · human only

Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 15

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

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Resources

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Source (apis.yml)

aid: clinkle
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source: []
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/clinkle.png
name: Clinkle
description: Clinkle was a Silicon Valley mobile-payments startup founded in 2012 by Stanford student Lucas Duplan. In 2013
  it raised roughly $30 million in what was then reported as the largest seed round in history, backed by Andreessen Horowitz,
  Peter Thiel, Marc Benioff, Accel's Jim Breyer, Richard Branson, and Intel Capital. The company promised a phone-to-phone
  payments technology but never shipped a viable product, launched a poorly received "Treats" debit-card app, cycled through
  multiple pivots and leadership turmoil, and lost its window to Venmo and Apple Pay. By 2016 Clinkle had quietly shut down
  with no official announcement. It is retained in the API Evangelist network as a defunct a16z portfolio lead; it publishes
  no live website, developer portal, documentation, or API surface today (clinkle.com resolves to a suspended-account page).
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/clinkle/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- a16z
- Peter Thiel
- Accel
- Intel Capital
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: portfolio-lead
x-status: defunct
x-defunct-year: 2016
x-founded-year: 2012
x-founder: Lucas Duplan
x-website-status: suspended
specificationVersion: '0.20'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-18'
tags:
- Company
- Payments
- Mobile Payments
- FinTech
- Peer To Peer Payments
- Defunct
- Startup
apis: []
common:
- type: Wikipedia
  url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinkle
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-19'
  status: backfilled
  pass: local-v1
  note: backfilled from .gitignore signal + verified work evidence