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.
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.
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.