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Stripe raises $18 million from Sequoia
- RexM 15y agoI love stripe. I got everything setup and accepting payments this morning for a side project in less than 20 minutes before I had to leave for work... It's such a joy to use.
- moses1400 15y agoWoo! Go Stripe! We use them on CloudContacts and love it.
- ChadMoran 15y agoStripe is a great example of proper developer experience joy. Good job guys!
- bmaeser 15y agothis is good news. i hope stripe uses this opportunity and expands to europe asap. congrats to the stripe folks!
- pc 15y agoHey -- just want to say thanks to the people on HN who've given us feedback and encouraged us along the way. We're building Stripe for the kind of people who read Hacker News, and the suggestions we've received here have generally been the most useful feedback we've gotten anywhere. So, thanks. We're pretty excited about the next few years.
- jmitcheson 15y agoPlease use the funding to expand to other countries!
- chrismiller 15y agoSeriously please come to Australia! I have a project ready to go (with the exception of billing). It is almost impossible for an Australian business to easily accept credit card payments in USD. I have looked at Saasy.com but the lack of data portability makes it an unattractive option.
- nreece 15y ago> It is almost impossible for an Australian business to easily accept credit card payments in USD. PayPal works just fine for that, although it's not so pleasant to integrate and manage.
- pm 15y agoAgreed. Australia!
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- garazy 15y agoPayPal really is the only solution unless you can get the one bank in Australia to let you open a USD account, you'll also need a modem to check your balance with them online. This is a good thread http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia/browse_thread/thread/dcc079980b68741d http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia/brows... about the complexities in setting it up in Australia and unfortunately I suspect Stripe will consider the risks outweigh the benefits of providing this sort of functionality in oz.
- verelo 15y agoIn Canada we're using CheddarGetter and paypal to accept USD, however as an Australian (Living in Canada....) i know exactly what you mean and have been through it before. I seriously suggest you look at Paypal, if you want to make switching easy however, abstract the implementation as much as you can. We're using CheddarGetter to do the abstraction for us, its $79 / month for CheddarGetter...but any half decent programmer who i trust with our billing doesnt cost far from that per hour anyway. Its a cheap means of getting around some smelly situations!
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- ngsayjoe 15y agoWe're waiting for you in Malaysia :)
- gumbah 15y agoWe need you in NL too! (desperately)
- marceldegraaf 15y agoI second this. Recurring credit card payments are virtually impossible in the EU at the moment, and the existing options (e.g. PayPal) suck or are too expensive.
- ernestipark 15y agoCongrats pc/jc! Hope you guys do great things going forward.
- phillmv 15y agoWe spent a not unsubstantial amount of time moaning about our inability to use you guys here in Canada, if that's any comfort.
- pc 15y agoYup. And there are people working full-time on making it happen.
- thedangler 15y agoI am really excited. Thank you for all your hard work. Can't wait for it to break Canadian ground. I waited 1.5 years for Twilio.... please say its sooner then that. Again. Great job.
- verelo 15y agoI just wanted to add another voice to this (and i'll up vote it dont worry!) We decided to go with paypal payments pro for our beta because stripe wasnt supported in Canada, as soon as you guys get here we'll make the switch however! Very excited you have people working on it!
- phillmv 15y agoBeanstream and Adaptive Payments here. Man, I dislike PayPal.
- sycr 15y agoGreat job. Stripe is one of the few valuations that doesn't seem out-of-this-world insane. Get yourselves into Canada!
- shimon_e 15y agoDon't forget to spend some of the money to lower your costs and then lower the fees. This field needs competition to make the old players uncompetitive and run them out of business.
- dspillett 15y agoJust to chime in with the others regarding international support: hopefully the funding will help you expand in that way. I'm in the UK and would like to see some more viable alternatives to Paypal.
- Dexec 15y agoI've always been extremely bullish on Stripe, so it's good to see this reaffirm my beliefs. Any investor would be crazy not to get in on this. Proud to see more Irish founders succeeding in the US, and as I know they'll be reading here: good job guys, keep it up.
- staunch 15y agoCongrats guys! There's a lot to like about Stripe, but my absolute favorite under-appreciated thing is their name and domain name. Hard to quantify just how much it helped, but I seriously doubt they would have had quite this trajectory with a name like Chargerly.com or even possibly Stripe.io.
- wmf 15y agoBut they don't even use the magnetic stripe!
- RandallBrown 15y agoThey're the new stripe.
- alapshah 15y agoSquare seems to do ok ($2Bn valuation) not owning square.com (their domain is http://squareup.com http://squareup.com)
- staunch 15y agohttp://www.square.com/ http://www.square.com/ seems to go to Squareup.com now. They're probably working on acquiring it. My point is mostly just about the name though. Square is an amazing name. Imagine if they had been called Skware or Swipify? I think you're better off being called Square and having Squareup.com for a while than settling for Swipify.com. That is what Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, Square, and many others have done. Bad: Poor name + poor domain. Good: Great name + poor domain. Best: Great name + great domain (Stripe).
- joelg87 15y agoI have to agree with this. We started out as bfffr (name and domain) and quickly changed to Buffer (domain bufferapp.com). It's tempting with things like Forrst and Dribbble around though :) (I still love both these startups)
- olivercameron 15y agoOne thing that YC drills into you is to not settle for B or C class talent. You just have to look at Stripe's team overview to see how talented this company is: https://stripe.com/about https://stripe.com/about Stripe is a lesson on how to build a company from the ground up. Surrounding yourself with incredibly intelligent people tends to have an outcome like this (both product and valuation). Congrats guys!
- vidar 15y agoI know what you mean, but don't think of this as the outcome. Funding is just the beginning, most of the really hard work remains to be done.
- olivercameron 15y agoOf course, it's a means to an end. I meant that the team they have built is inherently valuable, and because of the team they have an amazing product.
- erikpukinskis 15y agoAm I the only one who finds the language "C class talent" really distasteful? I feel like it's worse than referring to your employees as "human resources". I understand the importance of passing on people who are a close-but-in-the-end-imperfect fit for your organization. But using the concept of class and grading people from A to F just makes my skin crawl, and it makes me want to avoid any company or organization who things about people that way, YC included. Am I the only one?
- gabaix 15y agoI am used to it. It is a terminology shortcut to qualify people's actions. You'll find that from a lot people coming from universities. They tend to compare themselves a lot and use statistical horizontal comparisons. If not from HR, it is mostly to imply they are part of the A group.
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- blantonl 15y ago$18 million - Wow! Congrats to the Stripe team! This definitely draws a line in the sand for the online payment provider process. Looks like Paypal has been served. Disclaimer: my business is a huge Paypal user, but we've been actively looking at Stripe and put in our plans for 2012 to begin to transition to them. Exciting times!
- Newgy 15y agoActually, Authorize.net has a lot more to fear from Stripe. Can't wait to switch!
- bostonvaulter2 15y agoThe $100 million valuation doesn't seem too high to me. Especially considering the huge potential market.
- rabidonrails 15y agoWe've been using them since they were /dev/payments...best decision of our lives.
- yesimahuman 15y agoCongrats guys! I just want to say that I love Stripe. You are really changing the game. I love that you are focusing on developers. I wonder what might happen down the road when users make mistakes that put themselves in PCI compliance violation (like posting a form to their server with input names, thus sending the card info). What kinds of effects could this have on the business, their image, and the customers?
- kimura 15y agoIf only stripe was around a couple of years ago, we wouldn't have found ourselves locked down with BOA. Having to pay $500 termination fee sucks.
- markbao 15y agoCongratulations to the Stripe team!
- mshafrir 15y agoThanks to Stripe, I think that we'll start seeing a lot more weekend/hobby projects that charge for their service. (And I think that's a good thing.)
- rpbertp13 15y agoQuite likely. I think Sequoia's bet goes hand in hand with the trend as of late of 'democratizing' programming and CS education (Stanford online classes, Udacity, Codeacademy and others). More and better programming means more projects and more demand for payment platforms like Stripe.
- kareemm 15y agoFirst reaction: "Good, maybe now they will expand to Canada!" :) Congrats gang. I'm sure it's only partially a manpower issue with international expansion - dealing with institutions only moves so quickly.
- bkorte 15y agoTotally thought the same thing.
- stanmancan 15y agoYup, same here!
- cwilson 15y agoI hope you guys are considering offering payments for marketplaces now as well. Congrats!
- pclark 15y agoI love their name and I especially love their (old?) logo: http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/resized/0012/7313/127313v2-max-250x250.png http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/resized/0012/7313/12...
- aquinn 15y agoI'm sure Deutsche Bank were less enamoured with it. http://www.tt-orchestra.de/images/logo_deutschebank.png http://www.tt-orchestra.de/images/logo_deutschebank.png
- RegEx 15y agoI'm about to use Strip for an upcoming project due to the wonderful things I've heard about it on HN. I'm looking forward to giving it a go!
- TomGullen 15y agoWe're in the UK, and would love to move away from Paypal. Please come to the UK!
- Xixi 15y agoAwesome product, brilliant people, answered all my emails in less than 15 minutes... I so much want to become a customer that I'm seriously considering incorporating ShiningPanda LLC (or C-Corp) somewhere in the United States for this sole purpose. And probably dissolving ShiningPanda SAS (French equivalent, more or less, of a C-Corp) to reduce the costs, as SAS are pretty expensive to keep around, and it would become largely pointless. Do someone have experience with such an endeavor? The part that I can't seem to figure out is how to pay foreign people, living abroad, from an American company. All the while avoiding double taxation. If someone have references toward a good lawyer / accountant / tax lawyer to figure out all that... My email is alexis dot tabary at shiningpanda dot com
- alexwolfe 15y agoSuch a great service, it puts Auth.net to shame. Well done guys, congrats.
- ashhimself 15y agoI can only hope your service comes to Australia soon. If you ever need Australian beta testers please let me know.
- mekarpeles 15y agoCongratulations guys, great work on Stripe and awesome + superb customer service
- ssx 15y agoIs Techcrunch pissed they didn't break this story?
- tacheshun 15y agoGood job, guys! Congrats! Please, come to Europe soon!
- propercoil 15y agowow nice :)
- kamikazi 15y agoSomeone pls come to India. There is a serious need for good payment processor out here. Anybody who comes up with even half-decent solution wins 75% of mkt-share by default without any sales/mktg/BDM efforts.