On Sunday, March 14, Stripe, a US digital payment software company, announced that it had received $ 600 million in new investments (approximately € 500 million), which brought its total valuation to $ 95 billion (approximately € 80 billion). of Euro). The new valuation makes it the most valuable tech startup in the United States.
For the time being, the company has no plans to go public, although its value has exceeded that of other famous companies before their entry into the stock market, such as Facebook, which before the 2012 listing was worth 80 billion dollars (about 67 billion euros) or Uber, which before the 2019 listing was worth 72 billion dollars (about 60 billion euros).
However, Stripe is not the most valuable startup in the world: ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the social network TikTok, is valued at 140 billion dollars, while Ant Group, a Chinese payment company, is worth about 100 billion, even if its valuation is dubious due to some problems with the government.
Stripe produces a software infrastructure that, when inserted into a website or app, makes it very easy to send and receive payments online: when a user makes an online purchase, Stripe's software takes care of processing the payment and avoids the merchant of having to take care of relations with banks and other intermediaries.
The great growth of the company, which in one year has almost tripled its value in one year, has gone hand in hand with the enormous increase in online purchases, and therefore also in electronic payments, caused among other things by the coronavirus pandemic.
Stripe was founded in 2010 by two Irish brothers, Patrick and John Collison, who were little more than teenagers at the time and are now 32 and 30, respectively. In 2007, their software that created tools for eBay sellers, called Auctomatic, was funded by Y Combinator, a well-known Silicon Valley startup investment fund. They then sold Auctomatic in 2008 for more than three million dollars (at the time, just over 2 million euros). Two years later they founded Stripe and quickly raised good investments, including those of PayPal founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, as well as Y Combinator.
In the last year in Europe, more than 200 thousand new companies have joined the platform, which according to the company in 2020 had to manage more than 5 thousand requests for payments per second. Today, Stripe's software is used for example by Amazon, Google, Facebook and Deliveroo, as well as by millions of other companies around the world. Despite its huge success, Stripe still has great potential for growth, according to its founders.
The new $ 600 million investments will be used to expand the company's business in Europe, starting with the Dublin office, where at least one thousand new jobs will be created in 5 years (now the Dublin office has around 300 employees) . Stripe announced that it is working to develop in other countries as well.
We just raised a Series H and shared more details on our progress in Europe:
???? 1000 new jobs in Dublin HQ over next 5 years
???? New investors including Allianz, AXA, and NTMA (Irish state)
???? 200,000 new EU businesses launched since March 2020https: //t.co/U2HUAecSlK
– John Collison (@collision) March 14, 2021
