By Douglas MacMillan and Greg Bensinger
Online-payments startup Stripe Inc. said it had raised new
funding that values the five-year-old company at $5 billion from
investors including Visa Inc. and venture-capital firm Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Existing investors Sequoia Capital and American Express Co. also
participated in the round, which a Stripe spokeswoman said raised
less than $100 million.
Stripe is rapidly growing in value as it expands to more areas
of commerce. In addition to helping thousands of businesses process
payments on their own sites and apps, Stripe now facilitates
transactions from social networks Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest
through a "buy" button advertisers can place next to products for
sale on those sites.
At $5 billion, Stripe is valued 40% higher than in December,
when it raised $70 million at a valuation of $3.6 billion.
The San Francisco startup is among several companies trying to
simplify how businesses accept payments through mobile devices.
Forrester Research estimates that Americans will spend $90 billion
through mobile devices in 2017. Stripe takes 2.9% of most
transactions, plus a flat commission of 30 cents per charge.
Stripe has been using its funds to expand into new international
markets and now serves customers in more than a dozen countries.
Still, Stripe faces competition from PayPal Inc.'s Braintree unit,
which powers payments for ride-sharing service Uber Technologies
Inc. and lodging-sharing service Airbnb Inc., among others. Apple
Inc.'s Apple Pay has also quickly become a popular payments choice
for app developers.
But Stripe also handles payments for some apps, such as
Instacart, that accept Apple Pay. The startup struck another deal
last year to handle payments for Alipay, the service owned by
China's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. that counts more than 300
million users.
Square Inc., another prominent payments startup, recently filed
confidentially to hold an initial public offering, a person
familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
Before the new funding, Stripe had raised a total of $190
million from a range of investors including Andreessen Horowitz,
Founders Fund, General Catalyst Partners, Redpoint Ventures and
Sequoia.
Write to Douglas MacMillan at douglas.macmillan@wsj.com and Greg
Bensinger at greg.bensinger@wsj.com
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