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

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.”