# Clinkle

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/clinkle/  
**APIs profiled:** 0

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).

## Kin Score — 0.1 / 100 (minimal)

Scored 2026-08-21 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 0.1).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 50.0 |
| Contract Quality | 0.0 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 0.0 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 0.0 |
| Commercial Clarity | 0.0 |
| Access Clarity | 0.0 |

Regulatory layer — **Payments**: 0.0 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 0.0 (human-only)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | no |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | no |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Unknown — onboarding: unknown, pricing: unknown, trial: no (confidence: low).

## Tags

Company, Payments, Mobile Payments, Fintech, Peer-to-Peer Payments, Defunct, Startup

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/clinkle/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.