Online payment processor Braintree is buying person-to-person mobile app-maker Venmo. The story was first reported by the New York Times Bits blog and was confirmed by a representative from Braintree. (The official announcement will be coming later today). The Times is reporting that Braintree acquired Venmo for $26.2 million.

Chicago-based Braintree is the payment processor for a number of hot startups including GitHub, LivingSocial and Rovia, the company behind Angry Birds. The company has been focusing recently on processing mobile payments and courting developers, the people who are actually tasked with integrating payments into their apps, by offering tools like code libraries to make accepting payments easier.

Braintree's efforts are paying off. It recently announced it's processing $4 billion in transactions on an annualized basis, a quarter of them through mobile. It also expanded its services to cover processing in 30 countries, including the U.K., Canada and Australia.

For its part, Venmo offers an app that lets users send and receive small sums of money using text messaging. Launched in 2009, the company released its app from beta last March.

With the acquisition of Venmo, Braintree will be courting mobile payment customers too. Using Venmo's digital wallet and person-to-person payment applications Braintree is looking to make the process of buying things on a mobile device easier. (The company already provides a quick, one-click payment feature for companies like cab-finding service Uber.) 

More than 20 percent of e-commerce sessions are on mobile devices, according to Braintree. It handles about 10 percent of those mobile transactions, or approximately $1 billion, the company said.

More as the story develops.

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