Stripe Now Worth $95 Billion As They Raise New Capital

Stripe, a payment processing company that allows you to send and receive payments to other users over the internet, saw its valuation catapult to $95 billion as it closed $600 million in its latest round of funding from investors like Sequoia Capital and the Irish National Treasury Measurement Agency. This makes it the most valuable startup in the United States, ahead of Elon Musk's company SpaceX.

The Irish-American fintech company, founded by two Irish brothers, Patrick and John Collison in 2010, was born out of difficulty to receive payment over the web for their various side hustles at the time. The brothers decided to work on finding a more simplified process for that, and after just six months, had built a workable prototype.

The company has received a lot of funding since then. Their first being the sum of about $20,000 - $30,000 from Y Combinator, a company focused on providing early seed funding for startups.

The co-founder Paul Graham and Patrick Collison already had a relationship prior as Paul invested in Auctomatic, a company Patrick built before Stripe. Later, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, PayPal's founders also invested $2 million after meeting the brothers at a dinner organized by Y Combinator. 

Stripe currently has 14 offices globally, with over 2,500 employees. According to co-founder John Collison, the company systems handle about 5,000 transactions per second, ranging from payments, refunds, and other queries.

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, over 200,000 new companies in Europe have signed up to use their services. The pandemic and consequent lockdown led to a rise in the demand for online payments and e-commerce, and Stripe is one of the companies supplying that need, catering to bigshot companies like Amazon, Google, Zoom, Uber, and Facebook. 

With the latest funding, Stripe hopes to expand into other parts of Europe. They're set to create about 1,000 jobs in the home country of Ireland in the next 5 years. The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, headed by the NTMA was one of the investors, putting in the sum of $50 million. 

It also has plans of expanding to other parts of the world like India and Nigeria. Last year, it acquired Nigerian payment startup, Paystack, in a deal worth $200 million. It's the biggest so far. Paystack commonly referred to as the 'Stripe of Africa', is a startup company born in Lagos, Nigeria. Just like Stripe, it focused on providing a way to integrate payment services into an online or offline transaction in a way that saves time. 

According to Paystack founders, Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, Paystack wasn't for sale before Stripe approached them with the deal, but they were convinced that Stripe would be instrumental to their mission to accelerate payments across Africa.

This new development puts the founders' net-worth at 11.4 billion each according to the Bloomberg Billionaire's index.