Fintech start-up Stripe just raised $245m monster funding

Payments infrastructure company Stripe announced today a $245 million round of new funding, valuing the company at $20 billion.

Stripe will use the capital to scale in key areas, including:

• rapidly expanding its international reach and scaling engineering talent around the world;
• growing the capabilities of its global payments and treasury network, which lets businesses move money quickly, reliably, and programmatically anywhere in the world; and
• continuing to build out its operations and enterprise features, as larger businesses move to the Stripe platform.

Expanding global reach

While only three percent of global commerce is online today, that number is expected to grow to $4 trillion by 2020. And with more than 500 million people in Southeast Asia and India alone moving online in the next three years, businesses face a massive opportunity to tap into the globalization of online commerce.

“We believe in the contingency of progress,” said Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison. “Better global payments infrastructure will increase economic output, encourage entrepreneurship, and help upstarts compete with incumbents. By bringing Stripe into more markets and building out our capabilities for companies of all sizes, we hope to accelerate innovation around the world.”

Today, Stripe is live in 25 countries. But to enable native buying experiences around the world, the company is building a distributed global engineering team. Adding to existing engineering hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, and Dublin, Stripe today is also announcing a new global engineering hub in Singapore.

Deepening its integrated software and services stack

Online payments traditionally involves a sea of gateway providers, credit card processors, merchant acquirers, and specialized payment methods and wallets that vary across markets around the world.

“From its early days, Stripe sought differentiation through its ease-of-implementation and pace of innovation,” said Jordan McKee, Research Director at 451 Research. “Over the past year, Stripe has broadened its capabilities with new products like Stripe Issuing, Stripe Terminal and Radar for Fraud Teams. The result is an integrated payments platform designed for use by startups and large enterprises alike.”

Stripe is building a new kind of integrated technology stack for the programmatic movement of money, which includes:

• Advanced payments capabilities, such as supporting alternative payment methods, ACH and bank debits, and digital wallets; maintaining direct integrations with the major card networks; plugging into regional bank networks; offering instant payouts via debit cards for third-party sellers on marketplaces or platforms; and more.
• Revenue management, which allows users to move money in ways to increase top-line revenue, such as minimizing decline rates and transacting in local currencies.
• Global operations, which involves supporting businesses everywhere by removing hurdles around languages, regulatory bodies, FX, and cross-border payments.

On top of that foundation, Stripe is moving to solve other problems online businesses face, from business incorporation to issuing credit cards. This year, the company launched products for preventing fraud (Radar 2.0), issuing virtual and physical credit cards (Issuing), in-person payments (Terminal), and subscription-based businesses (Billing). All told, the company deployed more than 3,200 new versions of its core API over the past year.

The company now powers millions of businesses worldwide, including recent new customers Google, Mindbody, Spotify, and Uber. As enterprises look to rapidly reinvent themselves through digital transformation initiatives—and as fast-growing technology companies become large companies in their own right—Stripe is starting to cater more to an enterprise audience. Stripe recently released its Partner Program for third-party apps and services, and will soon roll out its first Premium Support offering.

Tiger Global Management led the round, with DST Global and Sequoia. They join existing Stripe investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and Thrive Capital.