Two Irish brothers founded Stripe ten years ago, making it one of the most used payment gateways in the world today.
Surely you won't notice it, because that's where part of its virtues lie, but if you've recently made a purchase at Glovo, Deliveroo, El Corte Inglés, Uber, Booking, or practically any online store based on Shopify, you've used Stripe's services.
This fintech of Irish origin but based in San Francisco has become this week the most valued unlisted Western startup of today. The latest round of funding worth $ 600 million raised this estimate to $ 95 billion. More than SpaceX, but it is that media such as the Financial Times also estimate that it is the highest valuation of technology before going public in history, surpassing Facebook in its early years.
The only exception to its number one ranking would be Chinese companies like ByteDance. No company not yet public in the Silicon Valley environment is worth more than Stripe.
How has Stripe become such a giant? His story is that of two prodigy brothers, John and Patrick Collison, who are barely in their thirties, and trained at Harvard and MIT respectively. And also the boiling point of a sector such as online shopping.
What Stripe does and offers
Stripe is in its definition a software company, known for having developed a system of payment gateways that is very easy to integrate into any website or electronic commerce, to which is added an API developed since the company's inception in 2010 that allows configuration with many variants.
Its great differential point, although now there are more solutions that include it, was to avoid that when making an online payment the user had to go to a third party's page. And they broke into this market when PayPal, but also Google, or Amazon had launched their own payment solutions.
That is today its main business route. Stripe earns money by applying a small commission to each sale -in Spain for example it stays 1.4% plus 0.25 euros per operation-, much less than those of its competitors and adding a multitude of payment options. Today there are more than 140 methods available, something in which it has also always been a pioneer, introducing, for example, payment with Bitcoins in 2015.
 |
| Patrick and John Collison, founders of Stripe. |
As it remains a private company, there is no public data on its true turnover or profitability, but the company has reported that during 2020 its API received an average of 250 million daily requests.
Stripe has focused on developers who actually build new websites. In startups and entrepreneurs who with just a few clicks and copying their API Keys could have a fully functional payment gateway that also recorded and helped to record taxes.
Hence, the company has always attributed its growth to word of mouth. "We realized that since Internet businesses tend to move faster, we need to move faster than the traditional financial system," Stripe Chairman John Collison said in an interview in the New York Times, and also impinged on this same to Guillaume Princen, director for southern Europe of the company two years after the company came to Spain.
From there, it has been adding new services, such as integrations with POS terminals, credit systems for buyers, a corporate credit card, and cloud software for large companies to keep their accounting.
The story of Stripe and the Collison brothers
The Collison brothers, John and Patrick, sold their first company when they were 19 and 17, and founded Stripe two years later, after leaving MIT and Harvard and joining the accelerator Y Combinator for startups. It was the year 2010.
That first company was called Auctomatic, and it offered an auction manager for individual sellers on eBay or Amazon when these websites still had more to sell between individuals than they are now.
Both brothers are largely precocious geniuses. Patrick won a world programming contest and left high school a year earlier than usual to study at MIT. John, the current CEO, for his part, obtained the record mark in the Irish selectivity.
After investments from various groups and Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal, Stripe began its meteoric rise. Always following the discretion of a very unobtrusive payment gateway, also in terms of brand.
Will it go public? The objective, to expand in Europe
The big question that remains to be answered is whether it will ever go public. These days, Dhivya Suryadevara, Stripe's CFO, answered in this regard that they were not in a hurry and that the new round of financing does not respond to capital needs, but to the will to hire 1,000 new employees, which would raise their figure by over 2,500.
Part of its expansion in recent years has focused on Europe, where rivals such as Square, Jack Dorsey's payment solution, have barely stepped foot on yet. In fact, Stripe is in more than 40 countries today, and 30 of them are European. Perhaps, by refocusing its headquarters in Ireland, Europe will find in it the technological prodigal son that it has been searching for years in the face of the shortage, with the exception of Spotify, of great technology in the Old Continent.
0 Comments