CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Braintree (www.braintreepayments.com), the fastest growing payments platform for online and mobile commerce, announced today the hires of Juan Benitez as Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Product and John Sturino as Vice President of Product. Both Benitez and Sturino will be based out of Braintree’s newly opened Silicon Valley office in Menlo Park, CA.
Juan Benitez brings over 15 years of experience leading technology organizations. Mr. Benitez comes to Braintree from Yahoo! where he spent 9 years in various capacities including several years as VP of Engineering in Yahoo!’s Advertising Products Group and VP of Search Advertising. Prior to Yahoo!, Mr. Benitez held engineering leadership positions at SEVEN Networks and Healtheon/WebMD. Mr. Benitez has a BS and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
“I am extremely excited to have Juan joining Braintree to take the reins as Chief Technology Officer,” said Bill Ready, CEO of Braintree. “Juan’s deep expertise in engineering, product development, and infrastructure will help take Braintree’s payment platform and engineering organization to the next level as we continue to simplify payment processing for online and mobile businesses. Having our CTO located close to our Silicon Valley clients will allow us to be even more responsive to their needs.”
John Sturino also comes to Braintree from Yahoo! and brings more than a dozen years of experience delivering technology products. Sturino spent the last 3 years at Yahoo! as VP, Advertising Platforms working on Display and Paid Search and previously led product management for Yahoo!'s consumer paid services. Prior to Yahoo!, Sturino held multiple global leadership roles for AOL, working in market in North America, Europe and Asia to manage billing and customer acquisition in region and globally.
“John brings an incredible amount of payments and e-commerce experience to Braintree,” said Ready. “Braintree is leading disruption in the payments industry with its developer-centric platform, allowing developers to quickly gain access to sophisticated payments capabilities. John will continue to drive innovation in our platform for both US and international services.”
Braintree recently announced an international expansion, which will give merchants located outside of the United States access to its full-stack payment solution, including its payment gateway, merchant accounts, recurring billing services, and Vault credit card storage solutions. Braintree will offer access to its international payment processing services in private beta over the coming months, with a full launch planned for third quarter of this year.
In May, Braintree opened new offices in Menlo Park as well as a new headquarters in Chicago’s West Loop. The Menlo Park office will offer Braintree more options to aggressively grow its product development organization and provides proximity to its Bay Area based clients, a roster which includes many of the Valley’s most notable startups including Airbnb, GitHub, Uber, TaskRabbit, HotelTonight and Heroku among others.
Braintree partnered with Riviera Partners on their CTO search.
About Braintree
Braintree, the web’s fastest growing payments platform, powers payments for innovative and high-growth mobile and online businesses. Braintree provides an easy-to-integrate API for developers while ensuring the merchants’ end users have a frictionless and secure experience at checkout. Braintree’s full-stack payments solution includes a payment gateway, merchant account, recurring billing, and credit card storage.
Braintree’s solution has been proven to scale and support many of the most discerning, high-growth companies on the web, including Rovio/Angry Birds, LivingSocial, 37signals, Airbnb, Fab.com, OpenTable, Uber, HotelTonight, Heroku and GitHub. Founded in 2007, Braintree is now processing more than $4 billion in annual credit card volume from over 2,000 merchants, nearly $1 billion in mobile payments, and its rapid growth earned it a spot on the 2011 Inc. 500 List as the nation’s 47th fastest-growing private company. Braintree was profitably bootstrapped for four years before accepting a $34 million investment from Accel Partners in 2011. Visit us at www.braintreepayments.com and on Twitter @braintree.