After a week of launching new services to bring payments giant Stripe into the areas of lending and credit, the company is announcing another big step forward to fuel its growth: it’s raising another $250 million in funding at a pre-money valuation of $35 billion, money to fuel more international expansion, launching more products and targeting larger enterprise-sized businesses.
The startup said that General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia are all in the round already. We’ve also heard that SoftBank is considering an investment. “It was a big miss when SoftBank didn’t invest two years ago,” one source close to the VC said to TechCrunch.
This is a huge jump in valuation for the company: it was valued at $22.5 billion just earlier this year when it raised $100 million.
The company spent the first several years of its life slowly building up its payments business — which primarily consisted of providing an API to e-commerce businesses so that they could easily integrate a payments option in their apps or websites. In more recent years, it’s started to accelerate its growth with a significantly larger range of financial services and now describes its business as a “Global Payments and Treasury Network”, with the latest products — cash advances and credit cards — coming on the heels of other services that include incorporation services, fraud protection, and and more. While the US remains its main market especially for new launches, it’s getting increasingly global. The company last week expanded its payments out to eight more countries and that is set to expand again to total 40 in the coming months.
The company says it processes “hundreds of billions of dollars a year for millions of businesses worldwide,” although it declines to give specific numbers. Wayfair, Airbnb, Twilio, GitHub, and The RealReal are among its customers.
“Even now, in 2019, less than eight percent of commerce happens online,” said John Collison, President and Co-founder of Stripe, in a statement. “We’re investing now to build the infrastructure that’ll power internet commerce in 2030 and beyond. If we get it right, we can help the internet fulfill its potential as an engine for global economic progress.”
We’ll hopefully be talking to him in the next 10 minutes and will update this story with more as we learn it.
Source: TechCrunch
