Payment technology company Stripe raised $245m in new funding, giving the company a $20B valuation — up from $9B when it was evaluated 2 years ago.
According to the company’s co-founder John Collison, Stripe will use the “primary capital” to finance international expansion and enable Stripe to handle more large accounts.
Speak of the devil: The San Francisco-based company announced a new engineering hub in Singapore yesterday, and recently brought in new client-giants like Uber, Didi Chuxing, and Spotify.
So, we’d assume there’s an IPO coming in the near future…
But, you know what happens when you assume. Collison has recently said Stripe has “no plans to go public.”
Still, the $20B figure places Stripe among a very small group of the world’s most valuable private startups (Airbnb, Palantir, and Uber) and widely credited (among a few others) for revolutionizing how businesses collect transactions.
Though they remain generally out of sight to consumers, reports show that around 84% of American adults shopping online bought something via Stripe in the last year.
They still have a long way to go to catch Square
With a gargantuan market value of almost $40B, Square is essentially what Uber is to Lyft. Bigger in most ways, but not necessarily better.
And to help compete, Stripe, who is traditionally more of a software nerd, rolled out a point-of-sale device (similar to Square’s) so its online customers can take in-person payments from consumers.