Patrick Collison
Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison’s Silicon Valley start-up Stripe has made its first acquisition: collaboration and team task management app Kickoff.
Patrick Collison tweeted the news this afternoon. He also confirmed in a tweet that the Kickoff app developed by its creator Benjamin de Cock will be maintained.
Developed for the Mac and iOS app stores, the Kickoff app enables fluid messaging and collaboration, as well as the assignment of team tasks on projects.
The beauty of the app is that it works fluidly across both Mac and iOS platforms.
De Cock had been working with Stripe as a freelance developer for the past year.
Writing in his blog, de Cock said: “Stripe’s team is insanely good. People are very kind and the office just feels like a place where you want to spend time when your co-workers are around. And obviously, I should mention how everyone is amazingly talented. As a designer, it’s bliss to feel the product is in great hands and that the user experience will be consistent all the way through.”
Patrick (23) and John Collison (21) were recently listed in the Forbes top 30 under 30 people in tech. They formed a start-up called Shuppa in 2007, which later became known as Auctomatic, attracted funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Y Combinator, and was acquired just a year later by Canadian firm Live Current Media for $5m (€3.2m) when the brothers were just 17 and 19, respectively.
Stripe, an online payments engine that simplifies the purchase of content and goods on websites, raised its first round of funding of US$2m in March 2011 from investment veterans Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital and Andreesen Horowitz. This was followed by a further funding round of US$18m in February 2012 by Sequoia Capital that at the time valued their company at US$100m.
A report in May by SecondMarket.com listed Stripe as ranking alongside Pinterest as one of Silicon Valley’s rising stars, giving it an informal valuation of US$1bn.
