From left: John and Patrick Collison. Image: Stripe
Unicorn payments company founded by two Irish brothers in Silicon Valley nine years ago continues to gain value.
Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison’s Stripe is now believed to be worth more than $22bn after the company raised an additional $100m in funding.
This represents a $2bn increase in valuation in just a few months.
The new investment came from Tiger Global, which previously led a $245m funding round that valued Stripe at $20bn in September 2018.
Stripe is currently deploying a new engineering hub in Singapore to join its existing network of hubs, which includes Dublin, Seattle and San Francisco. The Dublin engineering cohort currently employs more than 100 people.
Build it and they will dot-com
Stripe’s technology allows websites and apps to quickly and smartly deploy payment options, negating the need for the sea of gateway providers, credit card processors, merchant acquirers, and specialised payments methods and wallets that vary in different markets around the world.
More than 3,200 versions of its core API have been rolled out over the past year and the company’s customers include everyone from small start-ups to large organisations such as Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Target, SAP, Spotify and the National Football League.
I haven't said much in the past about @Stripe's board. We're fortunate to add Diane Greene, our fourth outside director today. (All four have to put up with myself and John, for six in total.)
— Patrick Collison (@patrickc) January 29, 2019
The toolkits devised by Stripe tackle everything from languages to regulations, foreign exchange, virtual cards, subscription-based billing and more.
Stripe was founded nine years ago when Patrick was 22 and John was 19. VMware co-founder and the former head of Google Cloud, Diane Greene, recently joined the board of Stripe.
When they were teenagers living in Limerick, the Collison brothers began a start-up called Shuppa in 2007 and it later became known as Auctomatic. The company 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.
Last year Siliconrepublic.com reported that the company was to locate its first engineering office outside of San Francisco at The One Building in Dublin to spearhead international development of its technology.
