Stripe, the online payments platform that powers e-commerce businesses around the world, has raised another $6.5 billion in a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Management. The round also included participation from existing investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, General Catalyst and Thrive Capital.
The new funding values Stripe at $50 billion, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world. According to Crunchbase, Stripe has raised a total of $8.7 billion in funding over 22 rounds since its inception in 2010. Stripe was founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, who moved to Silicon Valley to pursue their vision of building a simple and universal way for businesses to accept payments online. Today, Stripe serves millions of customers across 43 countries, including Amazon, Shopify, Zoom, Uber and Spotify.
Stripe’s growth has been fueled by the rapid acceleration of e-commerce amid the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as its expansion into new products and markets. In 2020 alone, Stripe launched its banking-as-a-service platform Stripe Treasury, its billing and subscription service Stripe Billing in Europe, its fraud prevention tool Stripe Radar 2.0 and its card issuing service Stripe Issuing globally.
Stripe also acquired Nigerian fintech startup Paystack for $200 million to boost its presence in Africa, invested in Indian digital payments company Razorpay and partnered with Salesforce to power its Commerce Cloud Payments. Stripe’s latest valuation marks a significant increase from its previous round in March 2021, when it raised $600 million at a $95 billion valuation. However, it also reflects a downward adjustment from its internal valuation of around $74 billion that was reported by TechCrunch in July 2022.
According to TechCrunch, Stripe lowered its own valuation due to several factors, including increased competition from rivals such as PayPal and Square; regulatory challenges such as GDPR compliance and tax reforms; macroeconomic uncertainties such as inflation and interest rates; and employee stock options that diluted its share price.
Despite these challenges, Stripe remains optimistic about its future prospects and plans to use the new capital to continue investing in product development, global expansion and strategic acquisitions. The company also aims to go public eventually but has not disclosed any timeline or details. Stripe’s co-founder and president John Collison said in a statement: “We’re investing a ton more in Europe this year — particularly Ireland — as we’re growing rapidly there both internally within our teams but also externally with our user base.”
He added: “We’re also investing heavily around our global expansion more generally — we’ve recently opened up offices across Latin America (Mexico City), Asia (Singapore) & Australia (Melbourne). We’re really excited about what lies ahead for us.”
