Alex Parmley had been thinking about starting his latest company, ORNG, since his days working at his previous company, Phood.
Phood, which launched in 2018, was a payments app that allowed students to use Dining Dollars to order food from third-party apps and merchants around the world. The company developed the first campus-integrated debit card and partnered with universities across the country, including the University of Texas at Austin.
As a business owner, Parmley experienced firsthand the long and tedious process of transferring funds. He recalled that it could take 15 to 30 days for vendors to receive the actual meal payment from the university after a student placed an order. This meant the company had to borrow millions of dollars to pay vendors while waiting for the university to process the payment. As inflation rose and the cost of borrowing money became more expensive to operate, Phood became more expensive.
Parmley wanted a product that could send money super fast in real time. He also wanted a change and knew that staying in the market could shut the company out. So after six years of running Phood, he made a big decision: he pivoted the company, changed the name to ORNG, and started pitching the financial contacts he'd made while building Phood on a bigger, more scalable idea.
“Our product is a network that can move money instantly and securely across borders,” he told TechCrunch about ORNG. “It's like messaging for businesses.”
ORNG formally came out of stealth mode with several customers, including publicly traded companies, on Friday but did not provide details.
ORNG works with banks, fintech companies and large corporations that need fast and easy payments. He said that currently, each country has their own way of sending money quickly, but the platform each country uses doesn't necessarily work with the platform other countries use. This can cause headaches and financial delays, just like when small businesses had to wait days for payments from their universities.
“Our approach unifies all these systems into one easy-to-use API,” Parmley said, adding that this allows businesses to process payments around the world through one platform. “We're not just making things faster, we're making them simpler. Stripe increased the GDP of the internet. We want to increase cash flow.”
Parmley said Phood's existing investors helped drive the change. Phood has raised approximately $5 million in total funding, in addition to using remaining Phood funds. ORNG is currently in the process of raising capital and expects to announce a close in the coming months.
“Alex learned a lot about the pace of B2B payments during his time in college, and it's great to see him apply what he learned the hard way to ORNG,” said Lauren DeLuca, founder and general partner at Motivate Venture Capital, an investor in Phood that doubled down on its investment in Parmly as the company pivoted.
Parmley came up with the new name one night while working late in Brooklyn, and said the company has a “very detailed plan” for what to do next. He said much of Phood's team stayed on through the transition, including co-founder Jackson Killion, an attorney. ORNG now employs 12 people, although Phood co-founders Matt Weymouth and Jake Westmoreland left to start companies and families, respectively.
Transforming a campus dining company into a real-time payments intermediary is quite a feat, but achieving big things has been a part of Palmy's life: He grew up in Alabama and didn't go to college.
“I learned everything from Mr. Wong. [a business owner] “When I was a kid, my mother worked in a restaurant, she would roll coins so we could eat, and my grandmother would let me take money from her money to buy what she needed to buy,” he recalls. His mother couldn't afford to send him to kindergarten, so she took him to work every day.
“I grew up struggling, so I had to learn math.”
One day, he was sleeping on a friend's couch on his college campus and wondered why it wasn't easier to order food to your house, and Phood was born. Now, he believes the journey of building Phood will help change the world.
“My life experiences were my education.”