Two Irish Brothers Oversee a $5 Billion Growth of their Payments Startup

At $5 billion, Stripe is valued 40% higher than in December, when it raised $70 million at a valuation of $3.6 billion. In addition to Visa, existing Stripe investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital and American Express also participated in the funding round, said Kelly Sims, a spokeswoman for San Francisco-based Stripe.

In 2014, Stripe raised both a Series C and a “Series C-1” round, led by Founders Fund and Thrive Capital respectively, for $150 million in financing just during that year. “We hope to continue working closely with them”.

CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison stated that these card networks were apparently “blindingly obvious people to work with” if the company was looking to increase the value of internet transactions and hasten its global rollout. “The fact that Visa has chosen to invest in Stripe, not in PayPal, is of absolutely huge significance”. That will help Stripe, which is a relatively small player in this space, compete against the likes of Square, PayPal and Braintree, not to mention those services set up by established companies, like Apple Pay.

Stripe launched in September 2011 to challenge legacy payment processors and now processes billions of dollars a year for thousands of businesses, from newly-launched start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Forrester Research estimates that Americans will spend $90 billion through mobile devices in 2017. Stripe takes 2.9 percent of most transactions processed via its platform, plus a flat commission of 30 cents per charge.

Discussion surrounding Stripe’s latest venture meanwhile is focusing on a potential antagonism between its now somewhat sidelined Bitcoin support and its focus on a deal with the giants of fiat. On the security front, Stripe will work with Visa to get access to its tokenization service, which turns a shopper’s card information into placeholder codes that are useless if intercepted by cyber thieves.