From left: Patrick and John Collison. Image: Stripe
Co-founder John Collison said this is Sequoia’s largest investment in Stripe to date, after supporting the company for 14 years.
Stripe now has a valuation of around $70bn as venture capital firm Sequoia Capital offered to buy shares from the fintech’s investors.
In a letter to limited partners, Sequioa has offered to buy up to $861m in Stripe shares at $27.51 each. An Axios report suggests it offered the price to limited partners in funds raised between 2009 and 2012 who may be looking for liquidity.
The offer is the latest vote of confidence in the payments giant founded by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison. Stripe was valued at $95bn back in 2021 but saw this slashed to $50bn a year ago. Since then, its valuation has been steadily rising.
“Lots of firms say that they’re long-term oriented, but Sequoia actually is,” John Collison wrote in a post on X yesterday (15 July). “14 years after their first check in Stripe, they’re making their largest investment yet. This is a secondary transaction; no funds will go to the company.”
In February this year, Stripe saw its valuation surge to $65bn after signing agreements with investors to provide liquidity to its current and former employees in a tender offer. It came in the context of growing speculation around a potential Stripe IPO. By April, the company had raised more than $694m.
The company dually headquartered in Dublin and San Francisco recently made a major change to its business by allowing customers to use some of its services without needing to be a client of its main payments platform.
Stripe made its three most widely used products dealing with checkouts, billing and fraud prevention available to companies processing payments with other providers. Patrick Collison said at the time that the idea was to to make the company more modular so clients can “use just the parts of Stripe most useful to them”.
Other than de-coupling payments from its platform, Stripe – which processed more than $1trn in payments last year – announced a host of AI upgrades to its services, including to its Optimised Checkouts Suite – where AI determines which payment methods to show for each customer.
The company also shared plans in April to slowly bring back crypto payments as part of its services after a six-year hiatus. John Collison said at the time that Stripe would start supporting global crypto payments this summer, starting with USDC stablecoins – a relatively stable cryptocurrency – on the Ethereum, Solana and Polygon blockchains.
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