Today MIT’s Technology Review highlighted a new payments startup, Naratte, based out of Sunnyvale, California with technology that uses ultrasound to authenticate and transmit payment data. PayPal, with a mobile payments headquarters right here in Boston after recent acquisitions of Boston based WHERE and Fig Card, is mentioned in the article as exploring the technology.

In fact, the company’s founder, Brett Paulson, has even built a demo app specifically leveraging PayPal’s API that enables contactless tap and go transactions on almost any phone on the market today.

The payment technology, dubbed Zoosh, establishes a secure link between payment source and merchant by generating a high-pitched sound which is inaudible for the human ear. “All you need is a speaker and microphone, which you already have on your device,” explains Paulson, Naratte’s chief executive and cofounder, in the article. “We’ve built everything in software so you just download an app to get a contactless experience.”

Laura Chambers, PayPal’s manager for mobile, has been quoted in a statement saying that she and PayPal were “very excited about Naratte’s Zoosh technology” after seeing demos. “Zoosh’s approach provides instant scale,” she offered, “which is a major hurdle for most mobile payment technologies.”

Naratte is also in talks with various cell-phone carriers worldwide. One of the promises of the technology is that it does not require any hardware additions on the side of the device manufacturers (whereas near field communications, or NFC, does). And as for concerns on the security side, Naratte has invested two years developing its audio-processing technology to make certain the approach is secure enough for payments data. They also cite it now being robust enough to work even in noisy environments.

Will we see Naratte joining PayPal’s mobile payments team here in Boston? We’ll have to wait and see. You can learn more about the company in this article in MIT’s Technology Review and by visiting their website.