Patrick Collison, Co-Founder of Stripe
Digital payments company Stripe has just landed another swathe of significant financial backers, with Visa among the group of new investors.
In a funding round that brought in under US$100m, the Collison brothers-owned company now sees its valuation at US$5bn, almost 50pc more than what it was valued at when the year began.
Back then the duo had raised US$70m from the likes of new investor Thrive Capital, along with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures.
Some of those are again involved in this latest round, marking another milestone in the five-year-old company, with American Express and Sequioa Capital two firms upping their stakes.
Surprising momentum
“I think the valuation jumped because of the surprising momentum of the business,” explained Patrick Collison, who is the CEO of the company. “Right now, we are ahead of our 2015 projections of revenue and transaction volume from merchants.”
Stripe’s moves have become bigger and bigger in recent times. A few weeks ago the company announced a deal with American Express to use its services for customers to pay for products, similar to the deal brokered with Alibaba last year.
Even Apple lists Stripe as a preferred partner in Apple Pay, with the likes of Twitter’s former No 2 in Dublin, Don O’Leary, coming on board to help drive the business forward, with a new Visa partnership on the go now, too.
Hit list
The Irish company was even listed in Mary Meeker’s influential Internet Trends report for breaking down complexity in the areas of customer relationship management and e-commerce, respectively.
Interestingly, Kleiner Perkins, the company of which Meeker is a partner, is one of the new investors.
“Partly through design and partly through circumstance, Stripe has a spectacular market opportunity at its doorstep,” said Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital partner, in Fortune.
“Stripe is at the triple intersection of mobile payments, cross-border commerce [and] outsourcing payments for medium and large companies.”
Main image via Web Summit on Flickr
