Entrepreneurial brothers Patrick and John Collison
E-payments company Stripe – founded by two young brothers from Limerick, Patrick and John Collison – has raised US$80m in a Series C funding round that has valued the company at US$1.75bn.
The brothers founded Stripe – which is on the cusp of a breakthrough deal with Twitter to bring e-commerce to the social networking platform – in Silicon Valley less than three years ago.
The company’s technology provides functionality to make it easier for website owners to enable transactions, getting rid of the long drawn-out shopping cart approach and making payments as seamless and easy as buying apps or content on an iPhone.
According to TechCrunch, the Series C funding round has been led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, with new investor Khosla and existing investors Sequoia and Allen & Co, bringing total funding so far to more than US$130m.
Joining the billion-dollar club
The company, which employs 83 people, raised its first round of funding of US$2m in 2011 from investment veterans Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Further funding of US$18m followed in 2012 by Sequoia Capital, valuing Stripe at US$100m at the time.
Of the 83 staff, 22pc are former founders and 36pc hail from outside the US.
Patrick (25) and John Collison (23) sold their first company Auctomatic to Canadian firm Live Current Media for US$5m (€3.2m) when they were 17 and 19, respectively. In recent weeks, the pair were listed among five Irishmen who made the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
In 2012, SecondMarket.com, a New York-based company that has served as a hub for transactions of pre-IPO Facebook stock, informally tipped Stripe as the next Y Combinator company that might be valued at more than US$1bn, following Dropbox and Airbnb.
Speaking with Siliconrepublic.com at the launch of Stripe’s payment service in Ireland last September, Patrick Collison said the motivation is to build one of the world’s best technology companies that makes it easy for businesses of all sizes to enable online transactions.
“Talking about IPOs and stuff at this stage is like trying to decide the career paths of four-year-olds,” said Patrick.
“We want Stripe to work well for the largest companies in the world. It’s part of our motivation – giving people the tools they need to build whatever payments experience that makes sense.”
