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Starting Payments Stripe has changed the game regarding how businesses can raise money online using a few lines of code. Today, the company announces that it has raised more funds. Stripe raised $ 245 million, valuing the company at $ 20 billion.
Two years ago, this is a big step forward in his previous series, which earned him $ 9 billion.
Led by Tiger Global Management, DST Global and Sequoia have also joined existing investors, as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and Thrive Capital.
The company plans to use this funding to hire more people for what it calls its "distributed global engineering team." She now has centers in San Francisco, Seattle and Dublin (her co-founders, John and Patrick Collison, Greet from Ireland), and will also launch a new hub in Singapore.
Engineering has been at the heart of the company's growth from the beginning, until now. Remember Paul Graham's famous essay on Stripe, which has served as a mantra to the way startups should develop. Today, Stripe boasts of having "all said, the company has deployed more than 3,200 new versions of its main API over the past year."
The funding highlights the persistence of a favorable fundraising climate with private organizations at increasingly impressive valuations. Venture capital companies and private equity companies have mobilized billions of people and are looking for promising fast-growing startups where they can invest that money. A certain number of start-ups give up, or delay, to make themselves known publicly to stay longer private, financed by them.
"We do not intend to make public," said John Collison in an interview. "We are fortunate to be in a position where Stripe's business is doing very well and the long-term opportunity is that we are very optimistic about providing the richest stack to businesses. Strong companies are not always dependent on external financing.
(Not everyone follows this path: Stripe's key competitor, Adyen, made his strong IPO debut this year.)
Stripe itself is a prime target for venture capitalists looking to park in large, fast-growing startups. The company says it now has "millions" of customers, including Google, Didi, Mindbody, Spotify and Uber. It is active in 130 markets for acceptance and 25 countries for the origin of charges.
Stand out as a faster and easier way to integrate payment infrastructure into websites and applications, in just a few lines of code, Stripe's choice is to replace the more laborious and often costly way of working with the banks. and other payment service providers in a complex chain of players including gateway providers, credit card processors, merchant acquirers, specialized payment methods, portfolios and more.
And while Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world and most retailers have a digital presence, e-commerce remains a relatively nascent field, with only about 3% of all online transactions being at a global average . This means a great opportunity for companies like Stripe, but also for competitors like Adyen, PayPal and others.
"We believe in the opportunity to move forward," said Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of Stripe, in a statement. "A better global payment infrastructure will increase economic output, encourage entrepreneurship and help new competitors compete with incumbents. By introducing Stripe to other markets and developing our capabilities for businesses of all sizes, we hope to accelerate innovation around the world. "Stripe estimates that online sales will reach $ 4 trillion by 2020 worldwide.
While payments are Stripe's bread and butter, the company has also diversified into Stripe, Stripe Terminal, fraud detection and potentially cash advances, among other offerings. These help the company to develop closer ties with its customers and potentially increase its margins.
"No one else is going as far as we are on software and technology," said co-founder and president John Collison.
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