Stripe’s Valuation Reaches $20B On $245M Raise

Stripe has just processed its largest payment to date. The startup has confirmed closing a $245 million funding round at a valuation of $20 billion. Bloomberg first reported the news.

Follow Crunchbase News on Twitter

Previously, Stripe was valued at $9 billion when it raised $150 million in late 2016.

The payments processor company, founded by John and Patrick Collison, now has $685 million in known capital raises, according to data gathered by Crunchbase.

The company counts CapitalG, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, and major credit card providers Visa and American Express as investors, among 25 other known funding participants. Google, which is loosely attached to CapitalG through its parent company Alphabet, is among Stripe’s many customers.

So what could Stripe do with the money, even if it doesn’t really need it, as Lee Fixel, a partner at Tiger Global, told Bloomberg.

Presumably, Stripe will continue to have the funds to attract and onboard major companies such as Amazon. Enterprise customers at that size are not easy to acquire. Furthermore, Stripe now has more capital than ever to compete with similar products offered by PayPal, a public company that has a market cap of over $100 billion, according to Yahoo Finance. Stripe also competes with Square (also public) and Zuora to some degree (public).

Stripe has also announced new products that are tangential to easy online payment processing, such as simplifying the process of creating virtual cards and using machine learning to “detect and block fraud,” per the company’s website.

In addition to new products, Stripe has made seven known acquisitions, according to Crunchbase. Its latest acquisition, Index, a payments startup funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, was announced in March of this year. A dollop of additional funding likely creates more opportunities to expand its portfolio of acquisitions.

And in general, VCs aren’t afraid to pour money into growth, of which Stripe has plenty of. For Stripe, this could’ve just been a matter of grabbing the easy money while you still can. (Slack did something similar recently, for context, albeit at a lower valuation.)