March 15, 2021 4 min read
This story originally appeared on Business Insider
Stripe has raised a new $600 million round of funding that sends the online payments processor’s valuation skyrocketing up to $95 billion, the company announced on Sunday.
The round, which includes Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, and Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), represents a significant uptick from the $36 billion valuation it held as of its last investment round in April.
That valuation makes Stripe the most valuable private tech company in the world, beating out SpaceX‘s last valuation of $72 billion. In fact, the Financial Times reports that Silicon Valley-based Stripe is now the most valuable privately-held tech company in history, surpassing the $80 billion or so mark achieved by Facebook ahead of its own IPO, or the $72 billion high-water mark hit by Uber.
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Dhivya Suryadevara, Stripe’s chief financial officer, told Insider on Sunday that even accounting for the large sums being thrown around, the round was “really more opportunistic” rather than capital raised out of strict necessity. Indeed, Suryadevara, who joined late last year after holding the CFO role at General Motors, says that she’s been “struck by how capital efficient the business is,” saying that the new funds will go into growth and expansion.
In particular, Suryadevara highlights Stripe’s opportunity to hire and develop its presence in Europe, which she says is doing “exceptionally well,” boasting that it has good traction with large and small companies in the region alike. The FT reports that Stripe plans to hire 1,000 new workers in its Dublin office alone, significantly growing its global employee base of over 2,500. Suryadevara says that Stripe views its market opportunity in Europe as being “as big as, if not bigger than our US business.”
Stripe, founded and led by brothers Patrick and John Collison, makes its stock in trade by helping software developers quickly and securely add the ability to take payments from would-be customers worldwide.
Where it originally focused on serving startups, Stripe has in more recent years expanded its focus on appealing to large customers, signing up companies like Zoom, Instacart, and even Amazon to power some or all of their payments infrastructure.
In April, Stripe president John Collison told Insider that the COVID-19 pandemic was driving a surge of new customers to the platform,as companies of all shapes and sizes look to build or bolster their e-commerce capabilities.
Almost a year later, Suryadevara says that Stripe has certainly seen a boost from online shopping, with customers like London-based food delivery company Deliveroo seeing a surge in users even as other more legacy brands come online for the first time. In the bigger picture, however, Suryadevara suggests that it’s a shift that was already happening.
“It’s a long-term trend that’s been accelerated in the last year, but it’s early days for e-commerce,” says Suryadevara.
As a privately-held company, Stripe doesn’t disclose specific financial information. But the company did say in a press release that its enterprise business, which serves larger customers, has more than doubled year-over-year, making it the company’s biggest business segment. Suryadevara said its enterprise business actually tripled in Europe specifically, further helping to account for the company’s projected growth on the continent.
There are no new developments when it comes to moving toward an IPO, Suryadevara said, though Adyen, one of Stripe’s leading rivals, is valued at some €58 billion on the public markets. More than anything, she says, the company is focused on using the funding and the momentum it’s seen to further build out its business — especially now that Stripe has “shown how effectively we’re able to grow.”
“As amazing as the last ten years have been,” Suryadevara says, the company is focused on “what’s ahead of us.”