Tilia Names Brad Oberwager CEO and Raises $22 Million

Payments platform Tilia has raised $22 million and named a new chief executive.

The San Francisco company announced Tuesday (Mar. 14) it had received strategic funding from Korean FinTech Dunamu, and named executive chairman Brad Oberwager as CEO.

“The investment will help Tilia to further scale its platform and address the growing market need for trusted, dynamic payments in online games, creator platforms, social commerce and other digital social worlds,” Tilia said in a news release.

Oberwager, the release says, has held leadership roles at Blue Tiger Network, More.com and Bare Snacks. Joining him will be new Chief Business Officer Catherine Porter, a veteran of companies that include Meta, Google and OpenTable.

“Today’s payments infrastructure was built for traditional commerce — it hasn’t caught up with the new way of living and working in a digital, creator-driven economy,” Oberwager said.

“At Tilia, we have a massive opportunity to unlock new revenue streams for both online creators and the platforms they build in, whether they are gaming worlds, social platforms, or next generation marketplaces.”

The company’s latest funding follows an unspecified investment last year from J.P. Morgan.

“We believe that contextualized commerce — such as virtual economies within games and virtual worlds — is an area perfectly positioned for innovative payments solutions to play a critical role in the coming years,” Drew Soinski, senior payments executive, managing director, J.P. Morgan Payments, said at the time.

Recent research by PYMNTS looked at opportunities for users to generate revenues within the virtual world.

For example, there’s play-to-earn (P2E), which lets players earn assets through quests and other tasks, as well as a marketplace for those assets to be bought and sold.

“Quick, frictionless connections to banking infrastructures help fuel these microtransactions, allowing gamers and other platform users to make real-time payments across games, virtual worlds or digital marketplaces,” PYMNTS wrote.

In addition, most of the widely-used metaverse platforms are built using blockchain technology, making cryptocurrency payment capabilities a natural complement.

But because the metaverse is still in its infancy, businesses need to ensure their payments infrastructure can handle multiple payments options and allow new methods to be added and integrated.

PYMNTS’ February 2023 report “Navigating The New eCommerce Landscape: Modernizing Payments For Marketplaces, Gaming, The Metaverse And Beyond,” showed that 40% of millennials and Gen Z consumers say they are greatly interested in the metaverse.