Stripe valued at $1.75bn after funding round

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 23 Ιανουαρίου 2014 - 03:20

Stripe, an online payments company founded and run by two Irish brothers in their mid-20s, said it had been valued at $1.75bn in its latest round of fundraising, making it the latest fast-growing Silicon Valley start-up to benefit from soaring valuations.

Patrick Collison, 25, said that he and his brother John, 23, came up with the idea for their company while at university in Boston four years ago and moved to California after attracting the interest of some of Silicon Valley's highest profile investors.

Stripe is already processing "billions of dollars a year of payments" for online businesses and operating in 12 countries, Mr Collison said in an interview with the Financial Times. The $80m it has just raised - taking the total so far to more than $130m - will be used partly for international expansion, the company said.

Although the online payments industry has already been through rapid growth, with PayPal processing $180bn of payments last year, Mr Collison said that it was still in the early stages of a global expansion that left the field wide open to new competitors.

"When you look at the [payments] industry on a macro basis, only 2 per cent of consumer spending happens online at the moment," he said. He added that he and his brother had started Stripe to build an "economic infrastructure and a developer platform for that [online] commerce that has yet to happen."

Besides handling credit card payments for its customers, Stripe has set out to handle a wide range of payment-related services, covering different foreign currencies and international markets, new platforms like mobile, and fraud prevention.

Stripe won an early following among start-ups like ride-sharing site Lyft that were looking for a simple payments solution to embed into their own services. Mr Collison said that it was now being adopted by large companies as well, and had set its sights on a global market of merchants who have yet to move into online commerce.

After taking money from YCominator - a start-up incubator that also backed Dropbox and Airbnb - the Collison brothers got backing from Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, co-founders of payments company PayPal. Along with a later round of investment from Sir Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital whose early investments included Google and Yahoo, the high-profile backers helped to open doors for the company, Mr Collison said.

Stripe has been in discussions with Twitter over the use of its technology to support ecommerce on the network, according to a report in online tech news site Re/code. The company refused to comment on the report.

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