Silicon Valley payments startup Stripe raises $245 million and lands $20 billion valuation

Patrick Collison (left)
and John Collison (right), cofounders of
Stripe

Stripe

• Online payments company Stripe has raised $245 million
  at a $20 billion valuation. 
• Stripe President John Collison says that the company is
  seeing a ton of growth from internet businesses expanding into
  the real world, like Stripe customer Warby
  Parker. 
• The money will go toward product development,
  international expansion, and building out its payments
  network.
• Collison says that there are no plans for an IPO any
  time soon.

Stripe, the online payments company with customers including
Target, Lyft, and Amazon, just announced a monster $245 million
round of funding that values the company at $20 billion.

This means that Stripe has more than doubled its valuation in two
years — in late 2016, Stripe
raised $150 million at a valuation of $9.2 billion. This new
round was led by Tiger Global Management, Sequoia, and DST
Global. All told, Stripe has raised $685 million in funding from
investors including CapitalG (formerly Google Capital)
and Visa. It was, and is, the most valuable financial services
startup in the world. 

In an interview, Stripe President John Collison says that
much of the company’s growth is coming from the gradual expansion
of internet companies into physical retail — for instance, Warby
Parker, the online eyeglasses retailer, which uses Stripe to take
credit card payments both from its website and its physical
retail stores.  

“A number of high-growth technology companies are expanding
to the real world,” says Collison, who cofounded the company
with his brother Patrick, who serves as CEO. “They want to do
that on Stripe.” 

This new money will be going toward building out its
international payments network, further developing its payments
technology with an eye towards serving larger businesses, and
expanding its operations to new countries. To that last point,
Stripe also announced the opening of its first “engineering hub”
in Singapore to compliment its existing offices in San Francisco,
Seattle, and Dublin, in the Collison brothers’ homeland of
Ireland. 

Collison says that the international expansion is a natural
next step: Companies like Google and Uber have looked abroad for
talent and growth opportunities, and so too must Stripe.

Stripe has been on something of a tear recently in terms of
new product releases: In the last few months alone, the startup
introduced Stripe Issuing, a solution to let customers issue
their own debit cards, as well as Stripe Terminal, a program for
point-of-sale systems and cash registers that are integrated with
Stripe payments. 

The big picture, Collison says, is to make it easy for any
of those “high-growth internet businesses” to take payments, and,
in turn, put that money “back out in the real world.”

Collison acknowledges that Stripe had an early reputation
for working primarily with startups — but now, he says, any
retailer can have a high-growth internet business that could
benefit from Stripe’s services. Indeed, he says, Stripe is
building new products with a specific eye towards making it
easier for internet businesses to adopt new technologies and stay
on the right side of the continued evolution of online
commerce. 

“The geeks will inherit the earth. The geekish companies will do
so,” says Collison. 

Going forward, Collison says that there are no specific plans for
an exit any time soon. He says that Stripe’s first priority is on
building the business and pursuing its mission, and any talk of
going public or going after more investor cash takes a backseat
to those priorities.

“We’re entirely focused on the business,” says Collison. “No
plans for an IPO. No plans for another funding round.”