The payment technology being developed in Silicon Valley by Limerick brothers John and Patrick Collison has been selected to power a new donations button platform being on one of the world’s most potent online communities Reddit and built by e-commerce player Dwolla.
Reddit has more than 100,000 independent communities called subreddits, some of which are dedicated to different causes.
As part of a collaboration between Reddit, Dwolla and Stripe, moderators of individual subreddits will be empowered to create campaigns and donation buttons within communities of like-minded users that can be generated at redditDonate.com.
The charities taking part include Michael Birch’s Charity:Water as well as Hack NY, Girls Who Code, Computers for Youth, Kiva, She’s The First, United Way, GoodsforGood, DonorsChoose.org, Fuck Cancer, iMentor and Pencils of Promise.
The future of making transactions
Generated at redditDonate.com, moderators of individual subreddits are able to create campaigns and donation buttons from a community of like-minded, certified nonprofits.
Once created, buttons are then embedded into the subreddit’s sidepanel until a moderator decides to switch out a campaign, add more, or remove it entirely.
Stripe’s role in the collaboration is to help process donors that wish to use cards. New nonprofits will be added in the coming months, according to the Dwolla blog.
The Reddit/Dwolla collaboration should be an interesting proving ground for Stripe’s technology; an online payments engine that simplifies the purchase of content and goods on websites.
Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison’s Silicon Valley-headquartered start-up Stripe recently raised US$20m in Series B funding led by General Catalyst, along with existing investors Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital and Elad Gil. The B round was joined by Redpoint along with angel investors Chris Dixon and Aaron Levi.
The company 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.
