Stripe, an online payments company whose consumer base includes Target (NYSE: TGT), Lyft, and Amazon (NADAQ: AMZN), just announced a hefty $245 million round of funding that boosted Stripe's valuation from $9 billion to $20 billion, according to co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Patrick Collison.
The startup's investors, including first-time backers Tiger Global Management and DST Global, are betting that Stripe has a bright future in the ultra-competitive, low-margin world of online payments. "The fact that they didn't need to raise billions of dollars speaks to the quality of the business," said Lee Fixel, a partner at Tiger Global.
Stripe's CEO claims the round of funding was not prominently advertised. "We talked to almost nobody," Collison said. "We are lucky in that we've been generating revenue from the start and have never been in the position where had to raise money. It's more about looking a year or two ahead and deciding if we want to stay on the current track or go big on some things."
"A number of high-growth technology companies are expanding to the real world," says Collison, who cofounded the company with his brother Patrick, who serves as CEO. "They want to do that on Stripe."
The money raised through funding will go to building out Stripe's international payments network, further developing its payments technology to serve larger businesses, and expanding its operations to new countries. To that end, Stripe also announced the opening of its first "engineering hub" in Singapore to complement its existing offices in San Francisco, Seattle, and Dublin, in the Collison brothers' homeland of Ireland.
"If I was an investor in Stripe, I would request and require more information," said Gil Luria, director of research at D.A. Davidson & Co. "But, when you look at their list of customers and impact on the industry, you don't have to take too much on faith. It's safe to say they are growing faster than Adyen and PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL)."
Stripe has also improved its fraud-detection technology, its contractor payment system and its Atlas service, which walks startups through the legal process of establishing a company. This is all part of Stripe's plan to expand the products and services it offers beyond basic billing.
That said, Collison admitted that the current political landscape is making it more difficult to achieve Stripe's goal of simplifying transactions across borders. "The Trump administration reversed the policy on opening up Cuba," he said. "We were excited to go there and sadly we can't." Heavier regulations in Europe and China's closed internet have balkanized online commerce. "The promise of the internet was that borders would become less relevant," Collison said. "Over the last two years, that promise has receded. The general tide is it is becoming harder to operate globally. I believe as strongly as I ever did-to some degree more strongly-in the value of making a global payment system happen."