Paydiant, a Boston-based mobile payments stealth start-up, announced it has raised $7.6 million in its first round of funding. The round was led by North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners, and will be used to expand product development, sales and marketing.

“Jim Moran, General Partner at North Bridge and John Simon, Managing Director at General Catalyst have joined Paydiant’s Board of Directors.”

Paydiant was co-founded by Chris Gardner, Kevin Laracey and Joe Paratore. The three already have venturing experience in the e-billing, payments and mobile space, as well as in collaborating together. VentureBeat’s JP Manninen noted that the new start-up “could come up with something interesting”, which may just turn out to be true in light in light of the three’s joint portfolio. Nevertheless, the mobile payment market is a very competitive one, and being “interesting”  is not always enough to gain market share against dozens of competitors, especially with service providers like AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon all getting into the business of mobile payments.

Techie Insider mentions that Isis, the mobile giants’ new joint mobile payment venture, has already recruited several U.S merchants. This gives a Isis head start over Paydiant, as well a tremendous amount of backing from the largest players in all of mobile.

“We do have signed merchants at this point,” Jim Stapleton, head of sales and account management at Isis and a veteran of AT&T Inc., tells Digital Transactions News. Stapleton, however, refuses to identify them, saying announcements would be made when the merchants and Isis are ready.”

To top off Paydiant and Isis, Google is also involved. Bloomberg reports Visa; Deutsche Telekom AG, France Telecom SA and other mobile operators have partnered up with Google to launch near- field communication (NFC) payment systems in the near future.

As the wallet losses ground to a multiplying number of increasingly advanced digital payment methods, gaming provides a petri dish for building business models around payment gateways and their extended outreach to users.  That includes Adknowledge’s iOS SDK launch as well its Android Supe Rewards SDK launch, targeting mobile game developers.