Online payments company Stripe, which was founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, is now valued at $95 billion after securing an additional $600 million (€502 million) in investment with the State's sovereign wealth fund among the investors.
The company has also announced plans to create more than 1,000 jobs in the Republic over the next five years .
Stripe is now among the most valuable privately-owned tech companies in the world with its valuation having almost tripled over the last year. The company’s technology handles hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions each year for its clients, which includes many well-known brands.
Funding
The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (Isif) was one of the primary investors, putting in $50 million in the company. Also participating in the funding round was Allianz, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, Axa and Sequoia Capital.
"We're investing a ton more in Europe this year, particularly in Ireland" said John Collison, Stripe's president. "Ireland is now a leading tech capital of Europe, with great talent and companies emerging all the time, we're keen to help cement that position."
Forbes Magazine estimates the Collison brothers are worth $3.2 billion each, putting them at joint 616th on its rich list, which numbers almost 2,100.
Stripe was already scaling at a significant rate prior to the Covid crisis. Since then it has seen a massive surge in business as more companies rush to beef up their online presence. More than 300,000 new businesses got started on Stripe’s platform over the past year.
The company found early success by coming up with a simple way for start-ups to accept online payments with just a few lines of code. Since then it has developed a range of products that make it easier for companies doing business online.
In tandem with this, the company has expanded from being a company whose solutions were mainly used by start-ups to being used by many of the world's leading brands including Amazon, Uber, booking.com, Deliveroo, NBC, Just Eat and Google.
The company employs more about 2,500 people globally, including 300 in Dublin . It set up an international engineering hub – its first outside of the US – in Dublin in early 2018.
Stripe was first declared a “unicorn,” that is a privately owned company valued at more than $1 billion, in 2014.
Valuable company
The company was valued at nearly $36 billion early last year after raising an additional $600 million from investors.
As of the start of this month, Stripe was ranked as the fifth most valuable unicorn company globally according to CBInsights, coming in behind TikTok parent Bytedance, Elon Musk's SpaceX, Chinese ride hailing company Didi Chuxing and Instacart.
As if further evidence were needed of the company's rise as a big player, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney recently became a board member of Stripe.
