Eckart Walther is the co-founder and CEO of CardSpring, a platform that makes it easy for merchants and publishers to create applications for credit and debit cards, bringing the power of web technology to the payment network. Eckart comes to CardSpring with a wealth of experience envisioning and building disruptive technology platforms at Silicon Valley startups and established powerhouses.

Prior to starting CardSpring in 2011, Eckart was an Entrepreneur in residence at Accel Partners (a current investor in CardSpring.) Prior to Accel, Eckart drove the marketplace business for LiveOps, which specializes in cloud technology platforms for enterprise. Before joining LiveOps, Eckart was the group vice president of product management for Yahoo Search, where he was responsible for all Yahoo Search products including web, multi-media, and social search products as well as Yahoo! Answers and Del.icio.us. Eckart also built broad internet platforms at TellMe Networks, one of the pioneers of Internet powered telecommunications and at Netscape.

At Netscape, Eckart co-authored the original RSS technology and served as the director of product management for internet platform and registrations products. He began his career at GE corporate research in the software technology program, where he specialized in AI research and worked on one of the first multi-processor versions of the UNIX operating system.

Eckart holds both BS and MS degrees in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York.