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Why ORNG’s founder pivoted from college food ordering to real-time money transfer

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3 weeks ago

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Alex Parmley has been thinking about building his latest company, ORNG, since he was working on his last company, Phood. 

Launched in 2018, Phood was a payments app that let students use dining dollars to order food from third-party apps and merchants anywhere in the world. It built the first campus-integrated debit card and worked with colleges across the nation, such as UT-Austin. 

Parmley discovered firsthand the long and boring process of moving money as a business owner. He recalled it could take 15 to 30 days for vendors to receive the actual dining dollars from the universities after students ordered. This meant the company had to raise millions in a debt facility to pay those vendors while waiting for payment from the universities to process. As inflation rates rose and debt borrowing became expensive, this made running Phood expensive. 

Parmley started wishing for a product that could let money transfer in real time, real fast. He was also ready for a change and knew that if he stayed in the market, there was a possibility his company would be squeezed out. So, after six years of running Phood, he took a big swing. He pivoted the company’s business, renamed the whole thing ORNG, and started pitching the financial contacts he made while building Phood on a bigger, more expansive idea.  

“Our product is a network that lets money move instantly and safely across countries,” he told TechCrunch about ORNG. “Kind of like sending a message but for enterprises.” 

On Friday, ORNG officially came out of stealth mode with a few clients, including publicly traded ones, though he declined to go into detail. 

ORNG works with banks, fintech companies, and large businesses that need quick and easy payments. He said right now, each country has its own way of handling fast money transfers but the platforms they use don’t always work with the platforms other countries use. This can cause a headache and financial delay — similar to how those small businesses had to wait days for the university to pay them. 

“Our method brings all these systems into one easy-to-use API,” Parmley said, adding that this means businesses can handle payments worldwide 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 the cash flow.” 

Parmley said that Phood’s existing investors encouraged the pivot. Phood raised around $5 million in total funding, and, in addition to using leftover Phood capital, ORNG is currently in the process of fundraising, with plans to announce a close in the upcoming months. 

“Alex learned a lot about the pace of B2B payments from his time in the campus space. It’s been awesome to see him take those hard-won learnings and apply them to ORNG,” said Lauren Deluca, founder and general partner of Motivate Venture Capital. His firm is an investor in Phood and is doubling down on Parmley as the company pivots.

Parmley came up with the new name one night while burning the midnight oil in Brooklyn and said the company has an “extremely detailed plan,” on what it plans to do next. He says much of the Phood team has stayed during the pivot, including one co-founder and attorney, Jackson Killion. Twelve people work at ORNG now, while the other Phood co-founders, Matt Waymouth and Jake Westmoreland, have since left to start a company and a family, respectively.

Pivoting a campus dining company into a real-time payment facilitator is quite the feat. But swinging big has always been part of Parlmey’s life. He grew up in Alabama and didn’t attend college.

“I learned everything from Mr. Wong [a business owner] at my mother’s restaurant job growing up, my mom rolling coins so we could eat and my grandmother letting me take the money out of hers and pay for the things she needed to buy,” he recalled. His mother couldn’t afford preschool, so she took him to work every day. 

“I grew up in the struggle, so I had to learn math.” 

One day, he found himself on a college campus, crashing on a friend’s sofa, wondering why it wasn’t easier to order food to the house, and hence Phood was born. Today he’s banking on the fact that the journey of building Phood will help change the world.

“My life experiences were my education.” 



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NASA Postpones October 10 Launch Of Europa Clipper Mission Due To Hurricane Milton

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October 8, 2024

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NASA is foregoing the opportunity to launch its Europa Clipper mission this week. It was supposed to launch on October 10 on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket but bad weather has caused a change of plans.

The agency cited hurricane conditions that are building up near the launch site at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Expecting high winds and heavy rain, the mission team has secured the Europa Clipper in a SpaceX facility at the Kennedy Space Center nearby. According to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), the Hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico will intensify by midweek when it hits Florida’s east coast. The launch site is on the west coast.

“While it is too soon to specify the exact magnitude and location of the greatest impacts, there is an increasing risk of life-threatening storm surge and damaging winds for portions of the west coast of the Florida Peninsula beginning early Wednesday,” the NHC stated.

“The safety of launch team personnel is our highest priority, and all precautions will be taken to protect the Europa Clipper spacecraft,” Tim Dunn, senior launch director at NASA’s Launch Services Program, said in a statement.

ALSO SEE: NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission Is Flying To Jupiter’s Moon Next Month; Facts You Must Know

The new launch date for the mission is yet to be announced but NASA says that opportunities are available until November 6.

“Once we have the ‘all-clear’ followed by facility assessment and any recovery actions, we will determine the next launch opportunity for this NASA flagship mission,” Dunn said.

The Europa Clipper spacecraft. Image: SpaceX

Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever made for an exploration mission. Equipped with nine instruments, the probe will measure more than 100 feet when it fully unfurls its solar panels.

The mission has an objective to investigate Jupiter’s moon Europa, which scientists believe has a vast ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust. Using its instruments, Clipper will study Europa’s composition and geology, its icy surface and the chemistry of the suspected ocean to determine if there are conditions that could support life.

ALSO SEE: NASA’s Flying To An Ocean World. Its Spacecraft Is Giant.

(Image: NASA)





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Blue Origin Set To Launch Brand New Human Rated Capsule To Space Today; Watch Live

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8 hours ago

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October 7, 2024

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Blue Origin is introducing its brand new space capsule today. The New Shepard spacecraft, which was originally scheduled to launch on the NS-27 mission at 6:30 pm IST from West Texas, will now lift off at 9:40 pm. This is the second human-rated vehicle which is being tested to expand the company’s flight capacity in order to “meet growing customer demand.”

You can watch the launch live on BlueOrigin.com. The webcast will begin 15 minutes before liftoff.

The new capsule named RSS Kármán Line, the company said, is equipped with advanced technologies that will improve its performance, reusability and accommodations for payloads on the booster.

ALSO SEE: Indian Civilians Can Visit Space Almost Free Of Cost Thanks To Blue Origin; Here’s How

Similar to its predecessor, 99 percent of the RSS Kármán Line’s components including the booster, capsule, engine, landing gear, and parachutes are reusable.

The vehicle will be tested by flying it to the Kármán Line, the internationally recognised boundary of space 100 km above Earth. This is an uncrewed flight meaning there are no humans onboard. Instead, the capsule will be carrying 12 payloads – five on the booster and seven inside the crew capsule.

The payloads include new navigation systems developed for New Shepard and Blue Origin’s upcoming rocket New Glenn; two different LIDAR sensors for the Lunar Permanence program – a collaboration between NASA and Blue Origin and ultra-wideband proximity operations sensors flying as part of a NASA TechFlights grant with Blue Origin’s Space Systems Development group.

ALSO SEE: Jeff Bezos-Owned Blue Origin Fires Rocket That Will Rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX; Watch

(Image: Blue Origin)





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Nobel Prize 2024 In Medicine Awarded To Two US Scientists For Discovery Of MicroRNA

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13 hours ago

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October 7, 2024

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Scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun have been jointly awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine for “the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.”

RNA or Ribonucleic Acid plays a key role in cell function. There is a messenger RNA or mRNA that directs the cells to make proteins using natural machinery.

The microRNA is a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation. Gene regulation is basically the process by which cells control the expression of genes. It helps them decide which genes to turn on or off, and to what extent. This allows the cells to adapt to different environment, develop and grow and maintain cellular balance among other key functions.

Failure in gene regulation can cause mutations which can cause diseases and unregulated cell growth that can lead to cancer and even diabetes. Cells and tissues have been found to develop abnormally without microRNAs.

“Their groundbreaking discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans,” a release from the Nobel committee said.

The finding also revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation and that microRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.

The discovery of the microRNA by Ambros and Ravkun was made in 1993 after years of research that started in the 1980s on a 1mm long roundworm. Thanks to their findings, scientists now know that gene regulation by microRNA has enabled the evolution of increasingly complex organisms and its abnormal regulation can cause many diseases. Besides, mutations in genes coding for microRNAs have caused congenital hearing loss, eye and skeletal disorders in humans.

ALSO SEE: Scientists Who Discovered How Our Bodies Feel Hugs And Heat Win Nobel Prize

More about the Nobel Prize winners

Victor Ambros is Silverman Professor of Natural Science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School after serving as a Professor at Dartmouth Medical School from 1992-2007. After receiving his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge in 1979, he also did postdoctoral research from 1979-1985 at the institution. He later became a Principal Investigator at Harvard University, Cambridge.

Gary Ruvkun is a Professor of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School. He has also worked as a Principal Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital. Ruvkun received his PhD from Harvard University in 1982 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge from 1982-1985.

The two scientists will share the award and approximately $1 million that comes with the diploma.

ALSO SEE: Scientists Who Developed Cheap And Environmental-Friendly Molecular Toolkits Awarded Chemistry Nobel





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