Stripe raises more than $6.5 billion at a $50 billion valuation
Payment processing platform Stripe has signed agreements for a Series I fundraising of more than $6.5 billion at a $50 billion valuation.
The fresh round was funded by existing Stripe shareholders—Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, MSD Partners, and Thrive Capital and also saw participation from new investors including GIC, Goldman Sachs Asset and Wealth Management, and Temasek.
Stripe said the funds raised will be used to provide liquidity to current and former employees and address employee withholding tax obligations related to equity awards resulting in the retirement of Stripe shares that will offset the issuance of new shares to Series I investors.
“Stripe does not need this capital to run its business,” a company statement said on Wednesday.
John Collison, Co-Founder and President of Stripe, said, "Over the last 12 years, current and former employees of Stripes have helped build foundational economic infrastructure for millions of businesses around the world, and this transaction gives them the opportunity to access the value they’ve helped create."
He continued, “But the internet economy is still young, and the opportunities of the next 12 years will dwarf those of the recent past. There’s so much to discover and to create. For us, it’s now back to work.”
Josh Kushner, Founder and CEO of Thrive Capital, said, "Stripe’s strategy is inherently indexed to secular trends that will only compound for decades to come: the growth of the internet economy and the trajectories of the world’s most innovative and forward-looking companies."
“Stripe will continue to be at the epicenter of every new technology current, and is the de facto choice for the businesses and builders that are creating the future. This is why we first invested in Stripe in 2014, and why we are proud to deepen our partnership," Kushner added.
As traditional businesses have continued to shift online, Stripe’s enterprise user base has compounded since 2019, and now includes some of the largest global enterprises like Amazon, Ford, Salesforce, BMW, and Maersk.
At the same time, Stripe continues to see strong momentum with startups. Founders are starting companies at a historic rate, and Stripe Atlas saw a 155% increase in incorporations from 2019 to 2022. Stripe benefits from the early role it plays in technology waves that reverberate across the industry, like mobile marketplaces, SaaS, and now AI, with users like OpenAI, Anthropic, Midjourney, Copy.ai, CoreWeave, and a long list of others.
One hundred businesses now handle more than $1 billion on Stripe every year. Seventy-five percent of these global winners use Stripe for more than just payments and over 70 per cent use Stripe to manage operations across multiple countries, as per the company statement.