A young Austin, Texas, technology company has been swept up in the presidential controversy that started with two words: You lie.

After Representative Joe Wilson heckled President Barack Obama with the infamous allegation during an address to a joint session of Congress earlier this month, contributions flooded into Wilson’s campaign coffers. That prompted Wilson’s staff to contract with Piryx Inc., which operates an online payment system for politicians and nonprofit groups. Once the deal was done, Piryx then came under attack by hackers trying to disrupt the flow of capital to Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina.

CEO Tom Serres, who founded Piryx in 2008, said the seven-person company is nonpartisan but that the distributed denial-of-service attacks appeared to be politically motivated.

The company shut down its servers for about 12 hours, but it learned plenty from the experience that Serres said would help in future crises.

“It was a good stress test for us,” he said. “We gained a fountain of knowledge about how to perform as a team.”

Campaign-contribution activity spiked sharply following the Wilson outburst during Obama’s speech about health care reform.

Wilson has reportedly raised more than $1.5 million since then, and his Democratic opponent Rob Miller has reportedly raised more than $1 million.

The concept for Piryx got its start when Serres became interested in public service while he was attending the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business. He was then enlisted to run the campaign of a local judge in 2005. The tool was developed to manage online campaign contributions but has since expanded to nonprofit organizations.

Last year, the company received $500,000 in seed money from an Austin-based angel investor, whom Serres declined to identify.

Since February, Piryx has grown from monthly transactions processed of $7,000 to more than $1 million.

About 40 percent of its customers are affiliated with politics; 40 percent are nonprofit groups; and the balance is small-business owners, Serres said.

In early August, the company opened an office in Silicon Valley, and it plans to raise $2 million to $2.5 million in venture capital to launch a marketing campaign, Serres said.

“We’ve never told people what we’re doing,” he said. “We’ve been pretty quiet.”

The market dominator in online payments is California-based PayPal Inc., which was founded in 1998. In 2002, eBay Inc. acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion.

PayPal reportedly managed $60 billion in transactions during 2008. Other competitors include Google Checkout, Germany-based Wirecard, and New York-based Moneybookers.

All are rushing to cash in on the trend of consumers increasingly completing financial transactions via the Internet.

For example, the number of U.S. households paying bills online is projected to grow from 48 million this year to 63 million by 2014, according to Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc.

Mark McKinnon, vice chairman of Public Strategies Inc., an Austin-based political consulting firm, said none of the other transaction systems are as affordable as Piryx.

The price has lowered the barrier to entry for organizations that want to raise money via the Internet, which is a growing part of the American political process, he said.

“Tom [Serres] and Piryx are putting tools into people’s hands to let them be part of the democratic process,” McKinnon said.