Stripe raises $18 million from Sequoia

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-09/stripe-said-to-get-funding-valuing-online-payment-startup-at-100-million.html

by zds • 14 years ago

312 71 14 years ago

RexM• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

Woo! Go Stripe! We use them on CloudContacts and love it.

ChadMoran• 14 years ago

Stripe is a great example of proper developer experience joy. Good job guys!

bmaeser• 14 years ago

this is good news. i hope stripe uses this opportunity and expands to europe asap.

congrats to the stripe folks!

pc2• 14 years ago

Hey -- 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• 14 years ago

Please use the funding to expand to other countries!

chrismiller• 14 years ago

Seriously 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.

ngsayjoe• 14 years ago

We're waiting for you in Malaysia :)

gumbah• 14 years ago

We need you in NL too! (desperately)

ernestipark• 14 years ago

Congrats pc/jc! Hope you guys do great things going forward.

phillmv2• 14 years ago

We spent a not unsubstantial amount of time moaning about our inability to use you guys here in Canada, if that's any comfort.

pc2• 14 years ago

Yup. And there are people working full-time on making it happen.

verelo2• 14 years ago

I 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!

sycr• 14 years ago

Great job. Stripe is one of the few valuations that doesn't seem out-of-this-world insane.

Get yourselves into Canada!

shimon_e• 14 years ago

Don'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• 14 years ago

Just 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• 14 years ago

I'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.

staunch2• 14 years ago

Congrats 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• 14 years ago

But they don't even use the magnetic stripe!

RandallBrown• 14 years ago

They're the new stripe.

alapshah• 14 years ago

Square seems to do ok ($2Bn valuation) not owning square.com (their domain is http://squareup.com)

staunch2• 14 years ago

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).

olivercameron2• 14 years ago

One 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

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• 14 years ago

I 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.

olivercameron2• 14 years ago

Of 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• 14 years ago

Am 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?

kmfrk• 14 years ago

I think it's fine as long as you don't think people are born ABC. You have to draw the line, and you have to be able to recognize talent - and the lack of such.

mahyarm• 14 years ago

I feel the same. I think the original concept also came from what kind of GPA a person got in university, which makes it even more distasteful.

byrneseyeview• 14 years ago

I would find it unpleasant to be called "C-class talent," but I'd also find it unpleasant to get a C. In both cases, that would prompt me to either step up my game or reconsider my priorities.

People are unequal, and in a business context, that means some people are worth less than others. You can grade them on a curve, but that just means we'll all learn that a "B" means you're a failure, and that really good companies are only recruiting among As and A+s. Differences in ability can't be fixed through semantics.

markerdmann• 14 years ago

I think you're spot on.

A fun game is to ask the person using this kind of language whether they consider themselves an A, B, or C player.

gabaix• 14 years ago

I 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.

Radim• 14 years ago

I did have a look, but didn't see anything out of ordinary there.

Surely the team must be great to be doing so well, and best of luck and kudos to them! But what exactly am I supposed to be seeing on that overview page? Which part triggered your "A class" detector?

kayoone• 14 years ago

From my experience running a startup this isnt necessarily true.

I hired what you would call B/C class talent because i loved their work ethic. Simply put, they get shit done and follow the guidelines while some A class people try to write the perfect solution which takes more time (planning overhead etc). Of course you need A class talent for certain positions, but certainly not all, not even in engineering.

Also if you are bootstrapping on a rather low budget, attracting A class talent isnt the easiest thing todo anyway.

blantonl• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Actually, Authorize.net has a lot more to fear from Stripe. Can't wait to switch!

bostonvaulter2• 14 years ago

The $100 million valuation doesn't seem too high to me. Especially considering the huge potential market.

rabidonrails• 14 years ago

We've been using them since they were /dev/payments...best decision of our lives.

yesimahuman• 14 years ago

Congrats 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• 14 years ago

If 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• 14 years ago

Congratulations to the Stripe team!

mshafrir• 14 years ago

Thanks 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• 14 years ago

Quite 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• 14 years ago

First 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• 14 years ago

Totally thought the same thing.

stanmancan• 14 years ago

Yup, same here!

cwilson• 14 years ago

I hope you guys are considering offering payments for marketplaces now as well. Congrats!

pclark• 14 years ago

I love their name and I especially love their (old?) logo: http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/resized/0012/7313/12...

aquinn• 14 years ago

I'm sure Deutsche Bank were less enamoured with it.

http://www.tt-orchestra.de/images/logo_deutschebank.png

RegEx• 14 years ago

I'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• 14 years ago

We're in the UK, and would love to move away from Paypal. Please come to the UK!

klaut• 14 years ago

Another vote for Stripe coming to UK :)

mbesto• 14 years ago

Yes please :)

Xixi• 14 years ago

Awesome 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• 14 years ago

Such a great service, it puts Auth.net to shame. Well done guys, congrats.

ashhimself• 14 years ago

I can only hope your service comes to Australia soon. If you ever need Australian beta testers please let me know.

mekarpeles• 14 years ago

Congratulations guys, great work on Stripe and awesome + superb customer service

ssx• 14 years ago

Is Techcrunch pissed they didn't break this story?

tacheshun• 14 years ago

Good job, guys! Congrats! Please, come to Europe soon!

propercoil• 14 years ago

wow nice :)

kamikazi• 14 years ago

Someone 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.

Stripe raises $18 million from Sequoia

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