They made their first $5m when they were teenagers. Now, Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison own a digital payments giant called Stripe, headquartered in Silicon Valley and valued at $9bn. Image: Stripe
Stripe, the payments company set up in the US by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, is now worth $9.2bn, following a new funding round.
Stripe has raised $150m in a round led by CapitalG and General Catalyst, in addition to its existing investors, such as Sequoia Capital.
The company was previously valued at $5bn after raising close to $100m from investors including card giant Visa.
Stripe president and co-founder John Collison told Siliconrepublic.com last year that the company fosters ambitions to be a 1,000-person company in the next few years.
The company has moved its European headquarters into the 45,000 sq ft The One Building in Dublin.
The ‘most valuable fintech start-up in the US’ has Irish origins
Stripe was founded six years ago when Patrick was 22 and John was 19.
The company’s technology platform enables hundreds of thousands of businesses to securely accept payments and create new revenue streams.
This morning, The Wall Street Journal labelled the company as “the most valuable US financial technology start-up”.
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.
Stripe’s new European headquarters are located in The One Building at 1 Grand Canal Street, Dublin 2. Image: Jones Investments Ltd.
A spokesperson for the company said it will use the additional capital to invest in more developer tools, a deeper software stack to solve more problems that businesses face, and a faster international expansion.
It is understood that half of US internet users have purchased something from a Stripe customer in the past year.
Major US companies that are moving over to Stripe include: SAP, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, GE, Adidas, DocuSign, Slack, Medium, NFL, Yelp and Unicef. In addition, both US presidential race contenders Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump used Stripe to raise funds for their campaigns.
Overall, Stripe has customers in 110 countries.
Stripe said that as the global economy builds on increasingly tech-enabled rails, it is doubling down on software tools that allow more companies to get started – and help older ones reinvent themselves for the mobile era.
