10 ms·

Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

267 points by sama 13y ago

scotthtaylor 13y ago
Wait, I thought they were already in the billion dollar club. Regardless, the cash should help against PayPal.
- pc 13y ago
  We were in the billions-of-dollars-of-annual-processing-volume club, if that counts?
  - scotthtaylor 13y ago
    Haha yep, keep up the great work!
deleted 13y ago
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pc 13y ago
Stripe cofounder here. As this news breaks, I want to say thanks to the HN community. Stripe is in large part the result of the feedback and advice we've received here since we launched on HN back in Sept 2011 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883.
- Implicated 13y ago
  And thank you, as a developer stripe has made a ridiculously difficult process ridiculously easy.
  - patcheudor 13y ago
    Not ridiculously easy, rather slightly easier as the merchant still must maintain aspects of their environment covered by the PCI DSS as they are still delivering Stripe.js from their server environment. Here's a bit more information on that: http://pciguru.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/developers-beware-stripe/ http://pciguru.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/developers-beware-st...
    - pc 13y ago
      This post is inaccurate. (Check out Darragh's response in the comments.) It's also worth noting that 1) Stripe and its processes are audited every year (we're a PCI-certified service provider), and 2) that MasterCard has actually followed a very similar strategy with their Stripe competitor.
      - patcheudor 13y ago
        Stripe's level one service provider which is independent of the merchants PCI compliance. The merchant is presenting the form for which the user enters their credit card information from within the context (same origin) of their domain: e.g., https://merchant.com/payment.. https://merchant.com/payment... As a result, under the PCI DSS they are obligated to protect that component of the transaction because if they don't a criminal could change it so that the card data doesn't POST to Stripe.com but instead goes to the criminal. Implementing a bit of Javascript and enabling SSL/TLS is far from all that is needed to be PCI compliant as a merchant so long as the payment form itself, whether delivered via an iFrame or a bit of Javascript is hosted within the merchant domain.
    - slexaxton 13y ago
      (Stripe Developer) - tl;dr -- This claims that Stripe.js runs on the merchant's server environment, causing the server to be subject to PCI DSS. In reality, Stripe.js is served from Stripe's servers, and runs only in the browser, and this has always been the case.
      - patcheudor 13y ago
        In order to get Stripe.js to execute within the same origin of the merchant environment the merchant must include code like this: <script src='//stripe.com/Stripe.js> within their HTTP response. This can be modified by a criminal on the merchant server to go to <script src='//badguy.com/mystripe.js> if the merchant has not implemented proper controls as outlined in the PCI DSS. The same can happen if they implement weak crypto. At the end of the day the merchant is responsible for this PCI related component because it's executing within the context of their merchant domain. Adding a bit more to be crystal clear here. The merchants customer will only see the address in the address bar for the merchant and will be able to validate the merchants public cert. No customer I know of would view the source to make sure that the reference to Stripe.js is in the source. Additional edit to address Silhouette's point. Yes, an attacker can modify the <a href to go to their site as well, but unlike an embedded script the customer does have a chance to call BS and back out of the transaction after growing concerned by the domain transfer & doing a Google search to see if it's legit. They don't have any chance in the case of an embedded script. Now if we go back to my original concern, it's that merchants are being told that they simply need to implement Stripe.js & enable HTTPS. Modifying that statement to something like this would be far better: "Stripe minimizes the scope of PCI DSS by removing the need to implement and audit security controls surrounding the transmission, processing, and storage of card-holder data. This does not; however, absolve Merchants from compliance with the PCI DSS & in order to assist with that we offer the following..."
- patcheudor 13y ago
  Now if Stripe could practice truth in advertising that would be great. SpecificallY: "Anyone accepting credit card payments must be PCI compliant. Stripe makes it easy to do so: Serve your payment page over SSL, i.e., the page's web address should begin with “https”, not “http”. Use Stripe.js or Checkout to accept payment information and transmit it directly to Stripe's servers. And you'll be PCI compliant!" https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-i-need-to-be-pci-compliant-what-do-i-have-to-do https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-i-need-to-be-pci-com... If it were only so easy. I guess there's no need for the merchant to have a PCI program, properly implement SSL/TLS, have anti-virus, change default passwords, protect agains SQLi, XSS, command injection or any number of other flaws which would give an attacker access to modify the Stripe.js code or the DOM for the page used for the collection of card information within the merchant's same origin. Nope, none of this is necessary because Stripe says that a merchant only needs to use HTTPS & implement their Stripe.js to be PCI compliant. It's interesting that this isn't how the PCI council sees things: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Tokenization_Guidelines_Info_Supplement.pdf https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Tokenization_...
  - pc 13y ago
    Hm, it looks like that support forum answer needs to be updated -- we actually support filling out PCI SAQs right from our dashboard (and automatically ask users to do so). We'll go update it. Also, if you'd like to drop me an email at patrick@stripe.com, would be happy to chat about PCI more.
    - pc 13y ago
      (Updated.)
      - patcheudor 13y ago
        Confirmed.
  - JunkDNA 13y ago
    Instead of just down voting this post, it would be helpful to know what specific parts of it are incorrect. This is the first I've heard of these objections.
- cfontes 13y ago
  I know it's not a priority but. Will you guys bring your magic to Brazil at some point? I would be really interested in it. On a side note I see Australia is in Beta :D which is great. Thanks
  - pc 13y ago
    We definitely will. (Sorry we don't have a timeline, though.)
    - cfontes 13y ago
      No Worries! Congrats and keep up the good work!
- diziet 13y ago
  Hope to see you guys update the web interface a bit for a performance/little more flexibility. The API is great, but the web interface could use a bit more love :)
  - pc 13y ago
    Agreed. On the way!
    - diziet 13y ago
      Awesome :) One big issue (with actual effect on revenue of your users) you guys could solve better would be handling delinquent/expiring cards better. We had to built some things in house to deal with this on our end, as once you have a non trivial amount of paying customers it can become at least a small pain. I know there are webhooks for failed payments etc but this stuff is really difficult to surface in the web interface.
      - guayosr 13y ago
        Eduardo from Stripe here - sending you an email now; I think we can help!
      - aculver 13y ago
        Hey Alex, Churn Buster (http://churnbuster.io/ http://churnbuster.io/) is available via Stripe Connect to solve exactly this problem. We're in private beta right now, so please email me at andrew@churnbuster.io if you'd like to take it for a spin. We've got a number of paying customers already (including some folks who previously had their own basic webhooks integration) and they're all saving much more in rescued transactions than they're investing in the product. Also, it's a 30-day free trial, so you literally can't lose! :-)
  - abuehrle 13y ago
    (I'm not associated with Stripe) Can you please give at least one example or suggestion?
- Negitivefrags 13y ago
  Seeing this comment makes me realise how much of a crazy technical risk I made choosing to use Stripe when I did. My company started charging for things in April 2012, but I made the decision to use Stripe months before that, something like January 2012. Only 4 months after you launched! We only did 1500 transactions on our launch day, yet at the time it was enough to break your service for a little while due to load. Your customer service at the time was really great and you refunded all the transaction fees for our launch day and gave us a list of all the customers who had tried and failed to make transactions so we could contact them. I don't think I realised at the time how small you guys were. We are lucky that you guys didn't fail, and I doubt that the me of today would have relied on such a young company. Certainly we could have moved to a different payment processor, but losing all the saved card data would have sucked a lot. So great work on that!
  - pc 13y ago
    Thanks for taking the risk :-).
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - nwenzel 13y ago
    Large companies tend to have arbitrary size requirements for potential vendors before allowing them to become an approved vendor. But I think companies should consciously choose startups as vendors for precisely that reason. Startups care more about figuring out what it takes to make customers happy.
  - yesimahuman 13y ago
    Yep, same here. Had our first customers in February 2012 on Stripe. Glad it worked out, but we always knew it would :)
- simonebrunozzi 13y ago
  Patrick, big fan here - we also met in person once, in the Mission. Congrats on the milestone, and keep up the good work.
  - pc 13y ago
    At Blue Bottle, right? (Thanks!)
- treenyc 13y ago
  I started building a SaaS for the legal industry around 2004. It was very small targeted at specific industry. Back then it was very hard to get everyone on board to use Credit Card. I ended up automating everything (including the monthly billing sent directly the user's inbox), but because of difficulty of payment gateway processing (getting a merchant account, parsing the authorize gateway code) And since I was a one man shop, I just had my users to send me checks at end of the month. I was not the best organized person back then. So let's just say there were quite few uncashed checks. Really wish Stripe was around them.
- dmix 13y ago
  One of the best parts of that 2011 thread is the number of people asking for Canadian support, then how quickly Stripe actually ended up supporting Canada (within 1 year roughly). We desperately needed Stripe and you guys delivered so quickly. Much appreciated.
- TomGullen 13y ago
  Stripe is great, we're really enjoying using it! I have three comments though if you're willing to listen! - I think your customer service department (although they do a good job) the quality has gone down, I often have to now wait several days for a reply. I guess this is the inevitability of growth though. In an ideal world it'd be nice to go back to when I got same day replies :) - We're a UK business. We take payments in EUR/GBP/USD. Like EUR, it would be nice to be able to withdraw our USD to our USD account in the UK! At the moment we're forced to withdraw it to our GBP account which is expensive. - It would be nice to be able to hold up withdrawls. At the moment our account is flooded with lots of payments, it would be nice to schedule all payments to be weekly/fornightly or a specific day of the month. Make our accounting process a lot easier and cheaper. Thanks for all the great work, I've been excited ever since I've started reading about you and am a big fan! (I got a tshirt on the way as well for reporting a small glitch which I'm excited to receive!)
  - peacemaker 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure you can hold up withdrawals. You just cancel the automatic transfers from your dashboard then when you want to do a transfer just schedule it manually (or through the API).
  - michaelschade 13y ago
    Thanks for the feedback, Tom! I understand how the USD -> UK transfers would help; we're looking into making that an option. For accounting, we've found that better reporting tools usually solve the need for less frequent transfers. Would one of the options at https://support.stripe.com/questions/reconciling-transfers-with-bank-account https://support.stripe.com/questions/reconciling-transfers-w... make this easier on you? Feel free to email me if not so I can understand more about your setup. Every part of Stripe should be incredibly simple, including accounting, and I want to make sure we get this right. Re support: you're right that the replies have been slower than they should be, though that's getting better. Basically, our userbase grew massively in 2013 and our support hiring didn't keep up with it. I spend all of my time on scaling the team, and we've more than doubled the size of the team in the past couple of months. More hires are on their way. I realize our internal machinations aren't very relevant—you just care that the result is excellent—and I'd like to be clear that we're working on this. You should expect to see significantly faster replies and more ways to get in touch with us over the coming months. While you should already be seeing improvement in this area, feel free to get in touch with me directly at michael@stripe.com anytime. I'd love to hear any other feedback, and am more than happy to help with whatever questions you have.
- stevenwagner 13y ago
  any Bitcoin integration plans?
- drbillnye 13y ago
  awesome man, joined the club 2 years ago and now my company relies on you and EasyPost, both YC companies to get our work done every day. It's great to work with your group, you guys have done a great job, props!
- ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
  Dear Stripe. I love you. Please add Micro-Transactions support like PayPal at the 5% + 0.05 cents transaction fee for payments under $12 dollars. Patiently waiting, Chris Norstrom.
- coreymgilmore 13y ago
  great job guys. i've used stripe and it definitely works well. love the "checkout" and the customization i can do with integration into my own page. pretty seamless compared to other vendors. only quip: price! would love to see a different pricing scheme for cheaper products. $0.30 fixed fee is a lot for carts that are only a few dollars!
jpdlla 13y ago
Wow! This is hug! Congrats to the Stripe team. Thanks for making our lives/projects/startups easier! BTW any other source on this? Edit: Covered in TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/with-an-eye-to-international-growth-payments-company-stripe-raises-80m-from-peter-thiel-khosla-and-sequoia-at-a-1-25b-valuation/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/with-an-eye-to-internationa...
vidar 13y ago
Any date for launching in iceland?
j2labs 13y ago
Keith Rabois is apparently teaming up with Stripe too. What a day for them! https://twitter.com/rabois/status/426157931239714816 https://twitter.com/rabois/status/426157931239714816
- stevenj 13y ago
  Is he joining the Board of Directors (via Khosla Ventures' investment this round)? Or in some other capacity?
  - pc 13y ago
    No, he isn't joining the board.
    - kavrick 13y ago
      Huh. Can you comment on what he's doing then?
mehdim 13y ago
Congratulations. Stripe really changed the payment implementation for Developers. Please know you have this valuation, support more Developers communities in meetups, developers conferences, API conferences. Twilio opened the way in the Telco world, please do it in the Payment one.
eieio 13y ago
Is there a way to read this article without logging in?
- glaugh 13y ago
  They let clickthroughs (clicksthrough?) from Google read the whole thing. https://www.google.com/search?q=Payments+Startup+Stripe+Joins+the+Billion+Dollar+Club https://www.google.com/search?q=Payments+Startup+Stripe+Join...
  - eieio 13y ago
    I tried googling the name of the article earlier and it didn't work, but apparently I screwed something up. Thanks for the link. And I like clicksthrough :)
- tzury 13y ago
  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304632204579337043662898228 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online....
lucidrains 13y ago
I am a developer interested in integrating a payment system into one of my sites where my target customers are mainly in the US. Could someone outline the major differences between Stripe and Balanced?
- stephen_mcd 13y ago
  All depends on the country your bank account is in. As an Australian company selling to the US, we've kinda been left in the lurch with their AU beta. When it was launched we were told they were working on being able to accept/convert USD into AU accounts, so at the time we (incredibly naively) started building our subscription code around their API, assuming it'd be ready by the time we were. Almost 6 months later and all we can get out of them is "we don't have an eta but we're working on it", and we've been sitting here the whole time losing money hoping that it's just around the corner, when really we should have just thrown out the work we'd done and gone with a provider that can already handle it.
  - hazelcough 13y ago
    Oh no — I'm very sorry to hear that. We try to avoid giving ETAs for functionality in order to avoid having people get stuck like this. (At the same time, we sometimes do indicate when we plan to do something — which does have this failure mode.) But we should probably have been clearer that it wasn't going to happen imminently — want to drop me a line at michelle@stripe.com and I'll see if there's any way we can help?
    - stephen_mcd 13y ago
      Email sent.
  - nmjenkins 13y ago
    You should check out https://pin.net.au/ https://pin.net.au/ – it's an Australian competitor to Stripe. You can accept payments in USD and Pin will settle in USD to an Australian account (this is exactly what we do at FastMail). We've been using them exclusively for the last few months and are pretty happy, other than the lack of Amex support, which they're still working on.
stevenj 13y ago
Congrats to the Collison brothers and the entire Stripe team! Patrick and John are two of the most remarkable people I've ever met.
pairing 13y ago
Congratulations to Stripe. It's great to see a company with an excellent product succeed against the huge incumbents. I use Stripe for all my projects and I can't recommend it enough.
benwerd 13y ago
Stripe is probably my favorite infrastructure startup of the past few years, and I'm delighted to see them do so well. Looking forward to seeing what happens in the _next_ two and a half years!
john2244 13y ago
Stripe is one problem which is solved really really well. Behind the pretty API there is serious amount of work with bureaucracy and traditional systems. Kudos to a job well done.
- raganwald 13y ago
  "Where there's muck, there's brass"--Paul Graham, quoting some timeless business wisdom.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
staunch 13y ago
Count down until the $3.5 billion acquisition by eBay/PayPal/Google/etc. Kind of amazing to see these happen on HN over the years.
- argumentum 13y ago
  Or rejected acquisition offer and subsequent raise at $10b+ valuation.
sushi 13y ago
I'd love to know what are stripe's plans to launch in countries where payment gateways are regulated and one company has constitutional monopoly (looking at you, Chile).
- superpatosainz 13y ago
  As a fellow Chilean citizen I can just say: what?! Is it Transbank? Redcompra?
  - sushi 13y ago
    Transbank indeed. As it stands today. it takes 2-3 months to get Webpay Plus (Transbank's payment gateway) implemented on the website.
    - superpatosainz 13y ago
      Thanks for the answer! Also, I just looked your profile and I can just say good luck with what you're doing!
WilliamChanner 13y ago
Great news.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tomasien 13y ago
Stripe is amazing - I can't believe it took until 2011 for something like them to exist. It really blows my mind - one of those "seems obvious, but only after you've seen it" things. Here's to y'all figuring out more than just CC payments in the future, and making them just as awesome.
kulkarnic 13y ago
This is both amazing and scary. The amazing part is obvious. The scary part is we now have companies that are worth a billion dollars that are unlisted and have no public scrutiny. Either a billion is not a very large number to the American people today, or we believe that public scrutiny is unnecessary for large companies today. I don't think at all that Stripe is one of them, but wouldn't a billion dollar company be a powerful entity that could invest to subvert the public interest?
- samstave 13y ago
  Do you have any idea how big visa was as an unlisted private company for decades??
- kamaal 13y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by 'public scrutiny'. Surely any common person on the street has absolutely no influence over Google or Microsoft wishes to do. And going public hardly has any influence at all. Beyond all Companies/Organizations are not Governments, they don't collect taxes and they are not voted into power. So they are not answerable to anyone. These are individual(s) who are investing their own time, money, and on their own risks to create wealth.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Beyond all Companies/Organizations are not Governments All juridical entities other than individual persons -- and this definitely includes all corporations -- are creations of government through which special privileges are given to particular individuals on the theory that by doing so some common good will be served.
- brc 13y ago
  > we believe that public scrutiny is unnecessary for large companies today It's a valuation, not a statement of turnover. Makes a big, big difference. And for the record I don't think a company requires more or less scrutiny because of the turnover or valuation.
- colinbartlett 13y ago
chunky1994 13y ago
Congratulations guys! You guys are pretty much living proof that it's still a good idea to start startups :)
Chris_Newton 13y ago
Congratulations to all at Stripe on the milestone. It’s nice to see a good idea being well executed and leading to the success it deserves. There can’t be many new businesses that have had such a positive effect on so many other new businesses in such a short time.
jmtame 13y ago
Was just watching the old prototype day recordings from the s09 batch. Impressively focused on the same problem since day 1: "We're like Authorize.net, but we're easier and faster." Lots of progress - congrats!
- billclerico 13y ago
  where are these? i'd love to check them out
  - jmtame 13y ago
    i have them backed up on an external hard drive. i'll upload on dropbox and send them to you
marcamillion 13y ago
Would love if someone could paste the contents of the article.
cschmidt 13y ago
Congratulations to the Stripe team. Strips is one of those excellent companies that make the tech world a better place. I actually spent the day working on adding Stripe integration to a Django application for my startup. Since there seem to be a number of Stripe people on this thread, I thought I might give some feedback. It was fairly straightforward to add a custom credit card form, but not as easy as I had expected. You've made a really nice form with Checkout, but that isn't flexible enough for many users. You leave a fair bit of work to your customers if they use the raw Stripe.js library. You mention your open source jquery library for doing client side validation [1], but don't provide any good examples. In particular, the neat trick in Checkout where you show the logo of the type of credit card being used isn't documented anywhere. This blog post [2] is a crucial piece of information. Your Django examples seems a little out of date, as you've been using Flask for your python examples. In short, I spent a day pulling things together, and got a form that has many of the nice features of Checkout. That's cool. However, you should really make it dead simple for your customers, with good examples that give ultra-slick validation and results. Thanks for listening, and continue being great. [1] https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment [2] http://yoast.com/checkout-field-validation/ http://yoast.com/checkout-field-validation/
- 23andwalnut 13y ago
  I'm working on something to solve this problem right now - a drag and drop stripe form builder.
chavesn 13y ago
Avoid paywall (am I the only one this always happens to?): http://google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304632204579337043662898228 http://google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  Happens to me. You wouldn't happen to be browsing with Ghosterly, would you?
  - namenotrequired 13y ago
    I have it without such extensions. I pasted the text from the article in a comment below if anyone still has difficulty accessing it (it took me a while to get through).
codex 13y ago
I've always thought of Stripe as a "faster horse" in the world of payments. I expect Google, Apple, or Square will find some way to disrupt credit cards completely and move consumers over to a new method of payment for most transactions. PayPal would also like to do that, but I'm not sure they have it in them. And Bitcoin may well upend them all.
slowdown 13y ago
When is Stripe coming to India? An estimate would be really nice! The only way Indian startups can get to use Stripe right now is by setting up an LLC/LLP in US/UK and accepting payments through the LLC. The problems with this approach are: 1) High initial cost of setting up the LLC. 2) Lawyer consulting fees and/or CPA fees. 3) Separate taxes for the LLC. 4) The same income is taxed in the country of the LLC AND India. India is one country that needs Stripe very badly right now. The payment gateways here have the shittiest/unreliable APIs you could imagine of. One of them (CCAvenue) even got hacked and it was found that passwords were being stored in plaintext. (!) However, the transaction volume is pretty much as high as any other country. Would love to get an idea of when Stripe would become available here..
- sumedh 13y ago
  Check out Payzippy.
denibertovic 13y ago
a link to an article that requires you to login to read it. Wonderful, just wonderful.
namenotrequired 13y ago
For those who can't access it: http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/ http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/ In the crowded field of online payments, venture capitalists are betting Stripe Inc. is a standout worth more than a billion dollars. The payments startup has raised about $80 million in new funding this week from venture-capital investors including Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Founders Fund, said brothers John and Patrick Collison, the company's co-founders, in an interview. Stripe, at just over four years old, is now valued at $1.75 billion. The lofty valuation for such a young company suggests Stripe is growing rapidly in the area of mobile payments—a market that Forrester Research estimates will add up to $90 billion in total U.S. spending in 2017—and posing a threat to eBay Inc. EBAY +3.84% 's PayPal, the digital-payments leader for more than a decade. Introducing WSJD, the Journal's new home for tech news, analysis and product reviews. The San Francisco startup is among several companies trying to simplify how businesses accept payments online and through a mobile device. Stripe provides easy-to-use computer code that any merchant can plug into their website or mobile app to begin accepting credit-card payments. The company takes 2.9% of most transactions in addition to a flat commission of 30 cents per charge—the exact same rate set by PayPal. "Payments are still startlingly disconnected and fragmented," said Stripe President John Collison. "Less than 5% of consumer spending happens online today. It's pretty clearly going to be much larger than that." The new funds will help fuel Stripe's international expansion. Stripe, now accepted in just 12 countries, has plenty of work ahead to catch up to PayPal, which is in more than 190 countries. Entering each new country requires meeting local laws governing payment providers, and sometimes requires Stripe to team up with existing businesses, Mr. Collison said. While the company doesn't disclose its revenue or number of merchants, its software is now used in thousands of popular mobile apps, including ride-sharing service Lyft and grocery delivery app Instacart. Its total payment volume has doubled since last September, he said. Stripe's transaction total is likely dwarfed by PayPal, which processed $125 billion in purchases last year. But according to Khosla Ventures' Keith Rabois, an early PayPal executive, Stripe has a competitive advantage because it created a simple new service that is popular with developers. "PayPal has a lot of legacy technologies cobbled together, whereas Stripe has reinvented everything they are doing from scratch," Mr. Rabois said. "Stripe has created a brand where all new developers start with the premise that Stripe is the right answer. If you were a developer today and you thought about using a different option, your engineers would think you're insane." Stripe saved costs for Lyft, which began using the service a year ago to let drivers quickly process mobile payments. "Stripe removed the need for us to hire additional internal staff to process payouts to Lyft drivers," said Lyft co-founder Logan Green in an email. For its part, PayPal stepped up competition in mobile payments last year, when it paid $800 million for Braintree, widely seen as Stripe's closest rival. On Wednesday, eBay said that activist investor Carl Icahn wants to split up the company, dividing its PayPal payments unit from its e-commerce site. A spokesman for PayPal declined to comment. Stripe has now raised more than $120 million from investors, who include PayPal alums Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. Stripe was last valued at close to $500 million when it raised funding in July 2012. An engineer-heavy workforce, Stripe now has about 90 employees. The company is in talks to power payments for a shopping feature on Twitter Inc. TWTR -0.14% 's social network, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Write to Douglas MacMillan at douglas.macmillan@wsj.com
ezl 13y ago
I'm curious about what one of these decks looks like. When you raise money, you presumably have some notion of how you are going to spend that money. $X for new engineers, $Y to build out the London office, etc. What does a plan for SPENDING the $80m they raised in this round even look like?
- majani 13y ago
  check out IPO roadshow presentations for an idea of what goes on at that level
showkhill 13y ago
mo cheol thu a phc!
silverbax88 13y ago
So fanstastic. I love Stripe. A lot. I use it. A lot. I will continue to use it. A lot. Congrats on their success. They deserve it for creating a product that beats the competition, hands down.

267 points by sama 13y ago

scotthtaylor 13y ago

Wait, I thought they were already in the billion dollar club. Regardless, the cash should help against PayPal.

pc 13y ago
We were in the billions-of-dollars-of-annual-processing-volume club, if that counts?
- scotthtaylor 13y ago
  Haha yep, keep up the great work!

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

pc 13y ago

Stripe cofounder here. As this news breaks, I want to say thanks to the HN community. Stripe is in large part the result of the feedback and advice we've received here since we launched on HN back in Sept 2011 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883.

Implicated 13y ago
And thank you, as a developer stripe has made a ridiculously difficult process ridiculously easy.
- patcheudor 13y ago
  Not ridiculously easy, rather slightly easier as the merchant still must maintain aspects of their environment covered by the PCI DSS as they are still delivering Stripe.js from their server environment. Here's a bit more information on that: http://pciguru.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/developers-beware-stripe/ http://pciguru.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/developers-beware-st...
  - pc 13y ago
    This post is inaccurate. (Check out Darragh's response in the comments.) It's also worth noting that 1) Stripe and its processes are audited every year (we're a PCI-certified service provider), and 2) that MasterCard has actually followed a very similar strategy with their Stripe competitor.
    - patcheudor 13y ago
      Stripe's level one service provider which is independent of the merchants PCI compliance. The merchant is presenting the form for which the user enters their credit card information from within the context (same origin) of their domain: e.g., https://merchant.com/payment.. https://merchant.com/payment... As a result, under the PCI DSS they are obligated to protect that component of the transaction because if they don't a criminal could change it so that the card data doesn't POST to Stripe.com but instead goes to the criminal. Implementing a bit of Javascript and enabling SSL/TLS is far from all that is needed to be PCI compliant as a merchant so long as the payment form itself, whether delivered via an iFrame or a bit of Javascript is hosted within the merchant domain.
  - slexaxton 13y ago
    (Stripe Developer) - tl;dr -- This claims that Stripe.js runs on the merchant's server environment, causing the server to be subject to PCI DSS. In reality, Stripe.js is served from Stripe's servers, and runs only in the browser, and this has always been the case.
    - patcheudor 13y ago
      In order to get Stripe.js to execute within the same origin of the merchant environment the merchant must include code like this: <script src='//stripe.com/Stripe.js> within their HTTP response. This can be modified by a criminal on the merchant server to go to <script src='//badguy.com/mystripe.js> if the merchant has not implemented proper controls as outlined in the PCI DSS. The same can happen if they implement weak crypto. At the end of the day the merchant is responsible for this PCI related component because it's executing within the context of their merchant domain. Adding a bit more to be crystal clear here. The merchants customer will only see the address in the address bar for the merchant and will be able to validate the merchants public cert. No customer I know of would view the source to make sure that the reference to Stripe.js is in the source. Additional edit to address Silhouette's point. Yes, an attacker can modify the <a href to go to their site as well, but unlike an embedded script the customer does have a chance to call BS and back out of the transaction after growing concerned by the domain transfer & doing a Google search to see if it's legit. They don't have any chance in the case of an embedded script. Now if we go back to my original concern, it's that merchants are being told that they simply need to implement Stripe.js & enable HTTPS. Modifying that statement to something like this would be far better: "Stripe minimizes the scope of PCI DSS by removing the need to implement and audit security controls surrounding the transmission, processing, and storage of card-holder data. This does not; however, absolve Merchants from compliance with the PCI DSS & in order to assist with that we offer the following..."
patcheudor 13y ago
Now if Stripe could practice truth in advertising that would be great. SpecificallY: "Anyone accepting credit card payments must be PCI compliant. Stripe makes it easy to do so: Serve your payment page over SSL, i.e., the page's web address should begin with “https”, not “http”. Use Stripe.js or Checkout to accept payment information and transmit it directly to Stripe's servers. And you'll be PCI compliant!" https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-i-need-to-be-pci-compliant-what-do-i-have-to-do https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-i-need-to-be-pci-com... If it were only so easy. I guess there's no need for the merchant to have a PCI program, properly implement SSL/TLS, have anti-virus, change default passwords, protect agains SQLi, XSS, command injection or any number of other flaws which would give an attacker access to modify the Stripe.js code or the DOM for the page used for the collection of card information within the merchant's same origin. Nope, none of this is necessary because Stripe says that a merchant only needs to use HTTPS & implement their Stripe.js to be PCI compliant. It's interesting that this isn't how the PCI council sees things: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Tokenization_Guidelines_Info_Supplement.pdf https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/Tokenization_...
- pc 13y ago
  Hm, it looks like that support forum answer needs to be updated -- we actually support filling out PCI SAQs right from our dashboard (and automatically ask users to do so). We'll go update it. Also, if you'd like to drop me an email at patrick@stripe.com, would be happy to chat about PCI more.
  - pc 13y ago
    (Updated.)
    - patcheudor 13y ago
      Confirmed.
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  Instead of just down voting this post, it would be helpful to know what specific parts of it are incorrect. This is the first I've heard of these objections.
cfontes 13y ago
I know it's not a priority but. Will you guys bring your magic to Brazil at some point? I would be really interested in it. On a side note I see Australia is in Beta :D which is great. Thanks
- pc 13y ago
  We definitely will. (Sorry we don't have a timeline, though.)
  - cfontes 13y ago
    No Worries! Congrats and keep up the good work!
diziet 13y ago
Hope to see you guys update the web interface a bit for a performance/little more flexibility. The API is great, but the web interface could use a bit more love :)
- pc 13y ago
  Agreed. On the way!
  - diziet 13y ago
    Awesome :) One big issue (with actual effect on revenue of your users) you guys could solve better would be handling delinquent/expiring cards better. We had to built some things in house to deal with this on our end, as once you have a non trivial amount of paying customers it can become at least a small pain. I know there are webhooks for failed payments etc but this stuff is really difficult to surface in the web interface.
    - guayosr 13y ago
      Eduardo from Stripe here - sending you an email now; I think we can help!
    - aculver 13y ago
      Hey Alex, Churn Buster (http://churnbuster.io/ http://churnbuster.io/) is available via Stripe Connect to solve exactly this problem. We're in private beta right now, so please email me at andrew@churnbuster.io if you'd like to take it for a spin. We've got a number of paying customers already (including some folks who previously had their own basic webhooks integration) and they're all saving much more in rescued transactions than they're investing in the product. Also, it's a 30-day free trial, so you literally can't lose! :-)
- abuehrle 13y ago
  (I'm not associated with Stripe) Can you please give at least one example or suggestion?
Negitivefrags 13y ago
Seeing this comment makes me realise how much of a crazy technical risk I made choosing to use Stripe when I did. My company started charging for things in April 2012, but I made the decision to use Stripe months before that, something like January 2012. Only 4 months after you launched! We only did 1500 transactions on our launch day, yet at the time it was enough to break your service for a little while due to load. Your customer service at the time was really great and you refunded all the transaction fees for our launch day and gave us a list of all the customers who had tried and failed to make transactions so we could contact them. I don't think I realised at the time how small you guys were. We are lucky that you guys didn't fail, and I doubt that the me of today would have relied on such a young company. Certainly we could have moved to a different payment processor, but losing all the saved card data would have sucked a lot. So great work on that!
- pc 13y ago
  Thanks for taking the risk :-).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- nwenzel 13y ago
  Large companies tend to have arbitrary size requirements for potential vendors before allowing them to become an approved vendor. But I think companies should consciously choose startups as vendors for precisely that reason. Startups care more about figuring out what it takes to make customers happy.
- yesimahuman 13y ago
  Yep, same here. Had our first customers in February 2012 on Stripe. Glad it worked out, but we always knew it would :)
simonebrunozzi 13y ago
Patrick, big fan here - we also met in person once, in the Mission. Congrats on the milestone, and keep up the good work.
- pc 13y ago
  At Blue Bottle, right? (Thanks!)
treenyc 13y ago
I started building a SaaS for the legal industry around 2004. It was very small targeted at specific industry. Back then it was very hard to get everyone on board to use Credit Card. I ended up automating everything (including the monthly billing sent directly the user's inbox), but because of difficulty of payment gateway processing (getting a merchant account, parsing the authorize gateway code) And since I was a one man shop, I just had my users to send me checks at end of the month. I was not the best organized person back then. So let's just say there were quite few uncashed checks. Really wish Stripe was around them.
dmix 13y ago
One of the best parts of that 2011 thread is the number of people asking for Canadian support, then how quickly Stripe actually ended up supporting Canada (within 1 year roughly). We desperately needed Stripe and you guys delivered so quickly. Much appreciated.
TomGullen 13y ago
Stripe is great, we're really enjoying using it! I have three comments though if you're willing to listen! - I think your customer service department (although they do a good job) the quality has gone down, I often have to now wait several days for a reply. I guess this is the inevitability of growth though. In an ideal world it'd be nice to go back to when I got same day replies :) - We're a UK business. We take payments in EUR/GBP/USD. Like EUR, it would be nice to be able to withdraw our USD to our USD account in the UK! At the moment we're forced to withdraw it to our GBP account which is expensive. - It would be nice to be able to hold up withdrawls. At the moment our account is flooded with lots of payments, it would be nice to schedule all payments to be weekly/fornightly or a specific day of the month. Make our accounting process a lot easier and cheaper. Thanks for all the great work, I've been excited ever since I've started reading about you and am a big fan! (I got a tshirt on the way as well for reporting a small glitch which I'm excited to receive!)
- peacemaker 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can hold up withdrawals. You just cancel the automatic transfers from your dashboard then when you want to do a transfer just schedule it manually (or through the API).
- michaelschade 13y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, Tom! I understand how the USD -> UK transfers would help; we're looking into making that an option. For accounting, we've found that better reporting tools usually solve the need for less frequent transfers. Would one of the options at https://support.stripe.com/questions/reconciling-transfers-with-bank-account https://support.stripe.com/questions/reconciling-transfers-w... make this easier on you? Feel free to email me if not so I can understand more about your setup. Every part of Stripe should be incredibly simple, including accounting, and I want to make sure we get this right. Re support: you're right that the replies have been slower than they should be, though that's getting better. Basically, our userbase grew massively in 2013 and our support hiring didn't keep up with it. I spend all of my time on scaling the team, and we've more than doubled the size of the team in the past couple of months. More hires are on their way. I realize our internal machinations aren't very relevant—you just care that the result is excellent—and I'd like to be clear that we're working on this. You should expect to see significantly faster replies and more ways to get in touch with us over the coming months. While you should already be seeing improvement in this area, feel free to get in touch with me directly at michael@stripe.com anytime. I'd love to hear any other feedback, and am more than happy to help with whatever questions you have.
stevenwagner 13y ago
any Bitcoin integration plans?
drbillnye 13y ago
awesome man, joined the club 2 years ago and now my company relies on you and EasyPost, both YC companies to get our work done every day. It's great to work with your group, you guys have done a great job, props!
ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
Dear Stripe. I love you. Please add Micro-Transactions support like PayPal at the 5% + 0.05 cents transaction fee for payments under $12 dollars. Patiently waiting, Chris Norstrom.
coreymgilmore 13y ago
great job guys. i've used stripe and it definitely works well. love the "checkout" and the customization i can do with integration into my own page. pretty seamless compared to other vendors. only quip: price! would love to see a different pricing scheme for cheaper products. $0.30 fixed fee is a lot for carts that are only a few dollars!

jpdlla 13y ago

Wow! This is hug! Congrats to the Stripe team. Thanks for making our lives/projects/startups easier! BTW any other source on this? Edit: Covered in TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/with-an-eye-to-international-growth-payments-company-stripe-raises-80m-from-peter-thiel-khosla-and-sequoia-at-a-1-25b-valuation/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/with-an-eye-to-internationa...

vidar 13y ago

Any date for launching in iceland?

j2labs 13y ago

Keith Rabois is apparently teaming up with Stripe too. What a day for them! https://twitter.com/rabois/status/426157931239714816 https://twitter.com/rabois/status/426157931239714816

stevenj 13y ago
Is he joining the Board of Directors (via Khosla Ventures' investment this round)? Or in some other capacity?
- pc 13y ago
  No, he isn't joining the board.
  - kavrick 13y ago
    Huh. Can you comment on what he's doing then?

mehdim 13y ago

Congratulations. Stripe really changed the payment implementation for Developers. Please know you have this valuation, support more Developers communities in meetups, developers conferences, API conferences. Twilio opened the way in the Telco world, please do it in the Payment one.

eieio 13y ago

Is there a way to read this article without logging in?

glaugh 13y ago
They let clickthroughs (clicksthrough?) from Google read the whole thing. https://www.google.com/search?q=Payments+Startup+Stripe+Joins+the+Billion+Dollar+Club https://www.google.com/search?q=Payments+Startup+Stripe+Join...
- eieio 13y ago
  I tried googling the name of the article earlier and it didn't work, but apparently I screwed something up. Thanks for the link. And I like clicksthrough :)
tzury 13y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304632204579337043662898228 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online....

lucidrains 13y ago

I am a developer interested in integrating a payment system into one of my sites where my target customers are mainly in the US. Could someone outline the major differences between Stripe and Balanced?

stephen_mcd 13y ago
All depends on the country your bank account is in. As an Australian company selling to the US, we've kinda been left in the lurch with their AU beta. When it was launched we were told they were working on being able to accept/convert USD into AU accounts, so at the time we (incredibly naively) started building our subscription code around their API, assuming it'd be ready by the time we were. Almost 6 months later and all we can get out of them is "we don't have an eta but we're working on it", and we've been sitting here the whole time losing money hoping that it's just around the corner, when really we should have just thrown out the work we'd done and gone with a provider that can already handle it.
- hazelcough 13y ago
  Oh no — I'm very sorry to hear that. We try to avoid giving ETAs for functionality in order to avoid having people get stuck like this. (At the same time, we sometimes do indicate when we plan to do something — which does have this failure mode.) But we should probably have been clearer that it wasn't going to happen imminently — want to drop me a line at michelle@stripe.com and I'll see if there's any way we can help?
  - stephen_mcd 13y ago
    Email sent.
- nmjenkins 13y ago
  You should check out https://pin.net.au/ https://pin.net.au/ – it's an Australian competitor to Stripe. You can accept payments in USD and Pin will settle in USD to an Australian account (this is exactly what we do at FastMail). We've been using them exclusively for the last few months and are pretty happy, other than the lack of Amex support, which they're still working on.

stevenj 13y ago

Congrats to the Collison brothers and the entire Stripe team! Patrick and John are two of the most remarkable people I've ever met.

pairing 13y ago

Congratulations to Stripe. It's great to see a company with an excellent product succeed against the huge incumbents. I use Stripe for all my projects and I can't recommend it enough.

benwerd 13y ago

Stripe is probably my favorite infrastructure startup of the past few years, and I'm delighted to see them do so well. Looking forward to seeing what happens in the _next_ two and a half years!

john2244 13y ago

Stripe is one problem which is solved really really well. Behind the pretty API there is serious amount of work with bureaucracy and traditional systems. Kudos to a job well done.

raganwald 13y ago
"Where there's muck, there's brass"--Paul Graham, quoting some timeless business wisdom.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

staunch 13y ago

Count down until the $3.5 billion acquisition by eBay/PayPal/Google/etc. Kind of amazing to see these happen on HN over the years.

argumentum 13y ago
Or rejected acquisition offer and subsequent raise at $10b+ valuation.

sushi 13y ago

I'd love to know what are stripe's plans to launch in countries where payment gateways are regulated and one company has constitutional monopoly (looking at you, Chile).

superpatosainz 13y ago
As a fellow Chilean citizen I can just say: what?! Is it Transbank? Redcompra?
- sushi 13y ago
  Transbank indeed. As it stands today. it takes 2-3 months to get Webpay Plus (Transbank's payment gateway) implemented on the website.
  - superpatosainz 13y ago
    Thanks for the answer! Also, I just looked your profile and I can just say good luck with what you're doing!

WilliamChanner 13y ago

Great news.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tomasien 13y ago

Stripe is amazing - I can't believe it took until 2011 for something like them to exist. It really blows my mind - one of those "seems obvious, but only after you've seen it" things. Here's to y'all figuring out more than just CC payments in the future, and making them just as awesome.

kulkarnic 13y ago

This is both amazing and scary. The amazing part is obvious. The scary part is we now have companies that are worth a billion dollars that are unlisted and have no public scrutiny. Either a billion is not a very large number to the American people today, or we believe that public scrutiny is unnecessary for large companies today. I don't think at all that Stripe is one of them, but wouldn't a billion dollar company be a powerful entity that could invest to subvert the public interest?

samstave 13y ago
Do you have any idea how big visa was as an unlisted private company for decades??
kamaal 13y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by 'public scrutiny'. Surely any common person on the street has absolutely no influence over Google or Microsoft wishes to do. And going public hardly has any influence at all. Beyond all Companies/Organizations are not Governments, they don't collect taxes and they are not voted into power. So they are not answerable to anyone. These are individual(s) who are investing their own time, money, and on their own risks to create wealth.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Beyond all Companies/Organizations are not Governments All juridical entities other than individual persons -- and this definitely includes all corporations -- are creations of government through which special privileges are given to particular individuals on the theory that by doing so some common good will be served.
brc 13y ago
> we believe that public scrutiny is unnecessary for large companies today It's a valuation, not a statement of turnover. Makes a big, big difference. And for the record I don't think a company requires more or less scrutiny because of the turnover or valuation.
colinbartlett 13y ago

chunky1994 13y ago

Congratulations guys! You guys are pretty much living proof that it's still a good idea to start startups :)

Chris_Newton 13y ago

Congratulations to all at Stripe on the milestone. It’s nice to see a good idea being well executed and leading to the success it deserves. There can’t be many new businesses that have had such a positive effect on so many other new businesses in such a short time.

jmtame 13y ago

Was just watching the old prototype day recordings from the s09 batch. Impressively focused on the same problem since day 1: "We're like Authorize.net, but we're easier and faster." Lots of progress - congrats!

billclerico 13y ago
where are these? i'd love to check them out
- jmtame 13y ago
  i have them backed up on an external hard drive. i'll upload on dropbox and send them to you

marcamillion 13y ago

Would love if someone could paste the contents of the article.

cschmidt 13y ago

Congratulations to the Stripe team. Strips is one of those excellent companies that make the tech world a better place. I actually spent the day working on adding Stripe integration to a Django application for my startup. Since there seem to be a number of Stripe people on this thread, I thought I might give some feedback. It was fairly straightforward to add a custom credit card form, but not as easy as I had expected. You've made a really nice form with Checkout, but that isn't flexible enough for many users. You leave a fair bit of work to your customers if they use the raw Stripe.js library. You mention your open source jquery library for doing client side validation [1], but don't provide any good examples. In particular, the neat trick in Checkout where you show the logo of the type of credit card being used isn't documented anywhere. This blog post [2] is a crucial piece of information. Your Django examples seems a little out of date, as you've been using Flask for your python examples. In short, I spent a day pulling things together, and got a form that has many of the nice features of Checkout. That's cool. However, you should really make it dead simple for your customers, with good examples that give ultra-slick validation and results. Thanks for listening, and continue being great. [1] https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment [2] http://yoast.com/checkout-field-validation/ http://yoast.com/checkout-field-validation/

23andwalnut 13y ago
I'm working on something to solve this problem right now - a drag and drop stripe form builder.

chavesn 13y ago

Avoid paywall (am I the only one this always happens to?): http://google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304632204579337043662898228 http://google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
Happens to me. You wouldn't happen to be browsing with Ghosterly, would you?
- namenotrequired 13y ago
  I have it without such extensions. I pasted the text from the article in a comment below if anyone still has difficulty accessing it (it took me a while to get through).

codex 13y ago

I've always thought of Stripe as a "faster horse" in the world of payments. I expect Google, Apple, or Square will find some way to disrupt credit cards completely and move consumers over to a new method of payment for most transactions. PayPal would also like to do that, but I'm not sure they have it in them. And Bitcoin may well upend them all.

slowdown 13y ago

When is Stripe coming to India? An estimate would be really nice! The only way Indian startups can get to use Stripe right now is by setting up an LLC/LLP in US/UK and accepting payments through the LLC. The problems with this approach are: 1) High initial cost of setting up the LLC. 2) Lawyer consulting fees and/or CPA fees. 3) Separate taxes for the LLC. 4) The same income is taxed in the country of the LLC AND India. India is one country that needs Stripe very badly right now. The payment gateways here have the shittiest/unreliable APIs you could imagine of. One of them (CCAvenue) even got hacked and it was found that passwords were being stored in plaintext. (!) However, the transaction volume is pretty much as high as any other country. Would love to get an idea of when Stripe would become available here..

sumedh 13y ago
Check out Payzippy.

denibertovic 13y ago

a link to an article that requires you to login to read it. Wonderful, just wonderful.

namenotrequired 13y ago

For those who can't access it: http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/ http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/ In the crowded field of online payments, venture capitalists are betting Stripe Inc. is a standout worth more than a billion dollars. The payments startup has raised about $80 million in new funding this week from venture-capital investors including Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Founders Fund, said brothers John and Patrick Collison, the company's co-founders, in an interview. Stripe, at just over four years old, is now valued at $1.75 billion. The lofty valuation for such a young company suggests Stripe is growing rapidly in the area of mobile payments—a market that Forrester Research estimates will add up to $90 billion in total U.S. spending in 2017—and posing a threat to eBay Inc. EBAY +3.84% 's PayPal, the digital-payments leader for more than a decade. Introducing WSJD, the Journal's new home for tech news, analysis and product reviews. The San Francisco startup is among several companies trying to simplify how businesses accept payments online and through a mobile device. Stripe provides easy-to-use computer code that any merchant can plug into their website or mobile app to begin accepting credit-card payments. The company takes 2.9% of most transactions in addition to a flat commission of 30 cents per charge—the exact same rate set by PayPal. "Payments are still startlingly disconnected and fragmented," said Stripe President John Collison. "Less than 5% of consumer spending happens online today. It's pretty clearly going to be much larger than that." The new funds will help fuel Stripe's international expansion. Stripe, now accepted in just 12 countries, has plenty of work ahead to catch up to PayPal, which is in more than 190 countries. Entering each new country requires meeting local laws governing payment providers, and sometimes requires Stripe to team up with existing businesses, Mr. Collison said. While the company doesn't disclose its revenue or number of merchants, its software is now used in thousands of popular mobile apps, including ride-sharing service Lyft and grocery delivery app Instacart. Its total payment volume has doubled since last September, he said. Stripe's transaction total is likely dwarfed by PayPal, which processed $125 billion in purchases last year. But according to Khosla Ventures' Keith Rabois, an early PayPal executive, Stripe has a competitive advantage because it created a simple new service that is popular with developers. "PayPal has a lot of legacy technologies cobbled together, whereas Stripe has reinvented everything they are doing from scratch," Mr. Rabois said. "Stripe has created a brand where all new developers start with the premise that Stripe is the right answer. If you were a developer today and you thought about using a different option, your engineers would think you're insane." Stripe saved costs for Lyft, which began using the service a year ago to let drivers quickly process mobile payments. "Stripe removed the need for us to hire additional internal staff to process payouts to Lyft drivers," said Lyft co-founder Logan Green in an email. For its part, PayPal stepped up competition in mobile payments last year, when it paid $800 million for Braintree, widely seen as Stripe's closest rival. On Wednesday, eBay said that activist investor Carl Icahn wants to split up the company, dividing its PayPal payments unit from its e-commerce site. A spokesman for PayPal declined to comment. Stripe has now raised more than $120 million from investors, who include PayPal alums Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. Stripe was last valued at close to $500 million when it raised funding in July 2012. An engineer-heavy workforce, Stripe now has about 90 employees. The company is in talks to power payments for a shopping feature on Twitter Inc. TWTR -0.14% 's social network, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Write to Douglas MacMillan at douglas.macmillan@wsj.com

ezl 13y ago

I'm curious about what one of these decks looks like. When you raise money, you presumably have some notion of how you are going to spend that money. $X for new engineers, $Y to build out the London office, etc. What does a plan for SPENDING the $80m they raised in this round even look like?

majani 13y ago
check out IPO roadshow presentations for an idea of what goes on at that level

showkhill 13y ago

mo cheol thu a phc!

silverbax88 13y ago

So fanstastic. I love Stripe. A lot. I use it. A lot. I will continue to use it. A lot. Congrats on their success. They deserve it for creating a product that beats the competition, hands down.