Stripe has joined the league of the world’s top 10 most valuable startups.
The payments company said yesterday (Sept. 26) that it had raised an additional $245 million of investment, pushing its value to $20 billion. Stripe’s valuation has more than doubled from $9.2 billion in just two years, lifting it (ahem) just above ride-hailing startup Lyft, according to PitchBook data.
Investors are betting big on companies like Stripe, Ant Financial, and Square in expectation of a digital transaction boom. Online payments could exceed $50 trillion by 2026, according to Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. These transactions could generate more than $200 billion in fees by that year, compared with $85 billion in 2016.
Stripe’s products are designed to streamline online payments and billing. While the San Francisco-based company began as a darling for tech startups, its customers now include industry titans like Google, Spotify, and Uber. The eight-year-old company says it plans to use the money it raised to expand its international reach, grow its payments and treasury network, and build out enterprise features as larger companies adopt its platform. The investment round was led by Tiger Global Management, along with DST Global and Sequoia.
Stripe operates in 25 countries and says it’s increasing its engineering team around the world. For now, only 3% of global commerce takes place online, a figure that’s expect to increase over time, reaching $4 trillion of sales in the next two years, according to Stripe’s statement. More than 500 million people in southeast Asia and India are expected to start going online in the next three years.