What is Stripe and why is it growing so much in the last year?

Successful business ideas in modern times are always worthy of admiration, especially when it comes to a business idea as meteorically successful as Stripe has had. If you don’t know what Stripe is , you should know that it has managed to establish itself as the most valuable startup in the United States.

Stripe

This is not exactly a small feat, as it has a valuation of $ 95 billion behind it. This payment company has managed to triple its value in just a couple of years, something so incredible that very few companies are capable of achieving it .

If you are unable to understand how amazing these numbers are, you should consider the fact that Stripe’s last valuation was as low as Facebook’s before they started their trades on the stock market. That is, around 80,000 million .

In fact, this value is higher than that of SpaceX, a company valued at 74,000 million. Only Chinese giants like Ant Group or ByteDance are able to match these levels. Therefore, the answer to what is Stripe can be summed up in the fact that it is one of the largest private companies in the world today .

What is Stripe and what is its success story?

You may wonder what Stripe is and why it has been so successful in such a short time. Obviously, in a world as competitive as today, only a company capable of standing out from the competition is capable of obtaining such a high valuation.

In addition, it is not enough to stand out, but it is also necessary to maintain yourself. It must be remembered that, although it has only been on the market for a short time, it has managed to stay afloat, something that only really solid companies can achieve.

Well, the history of this company dates back to 2009. In that year the brothers of Irish origin, Patrick and John Collison, joined forces to found Stripe in San Francisco. Since 2009, the company has had constant growth .

The years 2018 and 2020 deserve special mention, since there were very significant financing rounds. The 2020 one was the most important, since it aimed to contribute to the expansion of Stripe throughout the European continent and was carried out for an amount of 600 million dollars .

Obviously, the goal of expansion in Europe has one goal behind: to make Stripe the most popular payment gateway in the world. This objective is not only planned for private users, but also for corporations .

Stripe fintech

If you still don’t understand what Stripe is, you should know that it can be defined as a company aimed at helping people manage their payments . From the beginning it was limited to supporting small and medium-sized companies, but today it has become more ambitious, so it is focused on offering its services to large companies .

Stripe’s scope to date suggests that it is not unlikely to achieve its goal. Currently, the company handles payments of hundreds of billions of dollars annually and its presence extends to 42 countries .

His focus this year is on doubling his business capacity, something he aspires to achieve by incorporating Zapier and Twilio as clients. In addition, it is working together with other companies such as bank N26, Doctolib and Deliveroo , which already use its payment management services.

Arrival of the coronavirus pandemic

The crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic negatively affected companies around the world. However, in Stripe’s case, things were not hampered by the pandemic. On the contrary, this company managed to take advantage of the boom in electronic commerce derived from the pandemic to boost its growth .

This can be seen reflected in the fact that it has fourteen offices internationally, more than two thousand five hundred employees and a main headquarters in Dublin and another in San Francisco. Furthermore, as if this weren’t enough, it aims to create over a thousand jobs in Ireland in the future.

What is Stripe for the fintech world?

In the fintech world, Stripe is currently one of the largest benchmarks alongside PayPal. One of his greatest feats is to challenge the working method used by traditional banking . It does this by allowing companies to manage their business online with its app while also making it easier to receive payments.

This service is obtained through its payment platform , a carefully designed infrastructure in the cloud and applications to manage revenue. Those who use Stripe, generally companies, obtain the possibility of doing all the administrative management through a single system of payment options such as transfers, card payments, fund transfers, Google Pay and tokenization.

In this sense, one of the strengths of the company is the breadth of options it offers, since it supports more than 135 currencies, allowing it to handle more than 250 million API requests every day .

On the other hand, it is a fintech that does not stop updating to improve the services it offers. In 2020 this was exemplified by Treasury, an instrument designed to make it easier to solve financial processes that are traditionally complex . For example, Treasury makes it easy to open bank accounts. This feat was accomplished through an alliance with Evolve Bank and Goldman Sachs.

Qué es Stripe

In addition, Treasury represents a great advantage for other companies such as Shopify, since it allows users to access credit and debit cards and loans, without complications .

What is Stripe for other companies?

Another reason for Stripe’s success is that the scope of its services reaches out to businesses of all kinds. In fact, it is possible to classify companies that work with Stripe into two groups .

In the first group are e-commerce companies such as Under Armor, Chicfy, Glovo, Elparking and We Are Knitters. In the second group are classified companies with B2B platforms such as the aforementioned Shopify, DocuSign, Booking and Squarespace , they all have in common that thanks to their alliance with Stripe their payment system has been optimized.

However, the scope of Stripe’s partnerships is so great that it doesn’t end here, as it also has ties to software companies like Dashlane, Freepik, and Typeform. He even works with food service and transportation companies like Deliveroo, Instacart, and Lyft .

The most incredible thing is that these are just the names of some of the best-known companies currently working with Stripe. The reality is that since the pandemic began, more than two hundred thousand companies in Europe alone have been added to the list of allied companies.

Notorious broker Robinhood, known for being linked to the controversial rise in GameStop shares, which is valued at $ 11.7 billion, is just the fintech closest to Stripe in valuation . Considering how great Robinhood is, it shows just how impressive Stripe’s success has been.