Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison
Stripe, the payment platform for developers led by the Collison brothers from Limerick, will launch first in Ireland before the rest of Europe.
Stripe executives were in Dublin last week and revealed the plan to make the platform available in Ireland ahead of other European countries at a Wayra event organised by Telefónica.
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 the company at US$100m.
Stripe’s co-founders 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 US$5m (€3.2m) when the brothers were just 17 and 19, respectively.
Stripe’s technology makes it easy to accept mobile payments on any platform – web, mobile, desktop or tablet device – and companies like Lyft, Exec, Postmates, SideCar, Sesame and OrderAhead use Stripe to make it easy to pay for content using an iPhone or Android smartphone.
