John Collison, co-founder of Stripe.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Online payments technology provider Stripe announced Sunday that it had raised a new $ 600 million round of funding that valued the company at $ 95 billion – almost three times its last reported valuation of 36, according to PitchBook data Billion US dollars as of April 2020.
Stripe, which makes software that allows companies to accept payments over the Internet, intends to invest the new capital in its European operations, the company said in a press release. Thirty-one of the 42 countries Stripe operates in are in Europe, and President and Co-Founder John Collison has made Ireland – where the company is headquartered – a particular focus.
Stripe was founded more than a decade ago and is now by far the most valuable private fintech company. Robinhood is valued at roughly $ 11.7 billion after investors wrote the company a check for $ 3 billion in this year’s GameStop mayhem.
Stripe saw staggering growth during the pandemic as its revenues are largely tied to growth in online shopping. In its previous funding round last April, Stripe early highlighted the Covid-19 outbreak as “driving the economy online” and stated that “several years of migration from offline to online will be compressed into several weeks”.
“We are investing in the infrastructure that will power e-commerce in 2030 and beyond,” wrote CFO Dhivya Suryadevara, who joined the company in August after stepping down as CFO of General Motors. “The pandemic taught us many things about society, including how much can be achieved and paid for online, but the internet still isn’t the engine of global economic progress that it could be.”
In December, the company launched banking services through partnerships with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Barclays and Evolve Bank & Trust.
Despite its rapid growth and soaring valuation, the company didn’t take seriously the prospect of a Wall Street debut when John Collison told CNBC last year that the company had “no plans” to go public immediately.
The main investors in the new Series H round include Allianz, Fidelity, Sequoia Capital and the Irish National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA). Previous investors include Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Peter Thiel, and Capital G, Alphabet’s late-stage investment arm.
Earlier this year, Stripe invested $ 102 million in a Series B round for Fast – a smaller online checkout company based in San Francisco. Stripe, which also ran the startup’s Serie A, is the underlying payment route for Fast’s checkout product.
Stripe is a six-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company and topped the list in 2020.
Correction: The first paragraph of this story has been updated to reflect that Stripe’s most recent valuation is $ 95 billion.
