Pictured: Patrick and John Collison
Limerick brothers turned Silicon Valley kingpins Patrick and John Collison’s e-payments start-up Stripe has raised US$70m in an investment round that values the company at around US$3.5bn.
The company, in just the past year, landed major partnership deals with Twitter, Facebook and Apple.
The Limerick brothers’ company raised the investment from new investor Thrive Capital along with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures, according to the Financial Times which first reported the story.
The investment more than doubles the company’s valuation of US$1.75bn when it raised US$80m earlier in the year, according to Re/Code.
Patrick (25) and John Collison (23) 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.
The company now employs 120 people.
In recent months Stripe hired former Google X division executive Claire Johnson as its new head of operations.
Johnson, who had been at the search giant since 2004, worked on the launch of Gmail and Google Apps, and also ran a consumer operations unit for the internet giant.
