A chat with the head of Piryx, democracy’s PayPal

But it’s not just about campaign cash: Piryx also lets groups receive digital reports on their donation activities, review and audit all online donation filings and keep track of potentially inappropriate donations. Among other things, Piryx has helped launch the campaign for rocker Jon Bon Jovi’s Soul Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at alleviating poverty and homelessness.In this interview, Piryx founder and CEO Tom Serres talks about the inspiration for his company, what it costs to use Piryx and how he plans on dealing with the threat of politically motivated DDoS attacks.

What is Piryx’s target audience and what is Piryx providing them that PayPal currently cannot

We were originally aimed at political organizations who needed help doing rapid response for online fundraising and who were doing the same things that Barack Obama did, but having the added capability seeing where the donations and support are coming from through all points of virtual connectivity, whether that’s through Facebook, Twitter or blogs.

One recent client we signed up was Rep. Joe Wilson, who became famous for calling the president a liar earlier this month. There was a massive surge in both support for and opposition against him. And he came to us to set him up with an online fundraising page because for him to set up a processing account and then track where all the donations were coming from would have taken a long time using the PayPal API.

So we had him up and running in about five to ten minutes and in real time he was able to track where his messages were going, why people were donating to him and so forth. Once he got up and running, he was raising $1.5 million through our system in a matter of days. Had he relied on traditional payment processors he wouldn’t have had that kind of customization and he wouldn’t have been able to deploy it as rapidly as he did.