Confinity

Confinity Inc. is best known as the creator of PayPal. It was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company. Many of Confinity's initial recruits were alumni of The Stanford Review, also co-founded by Peter Thiel, and most early engineers hailed from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recruited by Max Levchin. Early investors included Nokia Ventures, Deutsche Bank, and Bell Melton, the founder of CyberCash.