Stripe Lands $80 Million in Funding, Now Valued at $1.75 Billion (Jan. 27, 2014)
Payments processor Stripe Inc. has secured $80 million in a new round of investment that valued the 4-year-old startup at $1.75 billion. The Series C investment—from sources, including Sequoia Capital, Kholsa Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz—brings Stripe’s total funding to more than $130 million.
Founded in 2011, Stripe offers tools that enable e-merchants to begin accepting payment cards on Websites and mobile apps within a day, using special APIs that eliminate the need for setting up a merchant account or dealing with banks. The company has racked up an impressive list of clients, including ride-sharing service Lyft, e-commerce platform Shopify and grocery delivery service Instacart. Stripe also reportedly is in talks with Twitter Inc. to add a shopping feature to the popular social messaging service. And in September of last year, the company began testing Autofill with Facebook. Stripe said it will use the new funding to bolster its infrastructure and ramp up expansion into international markets. The company currently operates in a dozen countries—10 of which it added last year.
Among Stripe’s competitors in e-commerce processing is Chicago-based Braintree Payments Solutions, which processes payments for Uber, OpenTable and Airbnb, among others, and was acquired by PayPal Inc. last September for $800 million.
