Founders: Patrick Collison (CEO), John Collison
Launched:Â 2010
Headquarters:Â San Francisco
Funding: $8.7 billion (PitchBook)
Valuation: $50 billion (PitchBook)
Key technologies: Software-defined security
Industry: Fintech
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 List: 8 (No. 8 in 2022)
Stripe put its technology at the center of the growing internet economy, helping the fintech become one of the highest-valued private companies in the world.
The San Francisco-based company, which provides payment software for e-commerce businesses, has followed its mission of "increasing the GDP of the Internet" since its founding in 2010 by brothers John and Patrick Collison.
The growth of e-commerce during the Covid-19 pandemic helped turbocharge the company's revenue, as well as the revenue of the hundreds of companies that handle their payments with Stripe, including Instacart, DoorDash, Shopify and Lyft.
In January, Stripe expanded its long-time partnership with the biggest e-commerce seller of all, Amazon, and it now processes a significant portion of Amazon's total payments volume across its businesses in the U.S., Europe, and Canada, from Prime to Audible, Kindle, and Amazon Pay.
In total, businesses using Stripe processed more than $817 billion in total volume in 2022, up 26% year-over-year, according to the company.
While those growth rates are still strong, it does mark a "significant deceleration from the breakneck growth that we saw during 2020 and 2021," the Collison brothers wrote in the company's annual letter.
The combination of rising inflation, fears of a recession, higher interest rates and other factors over the last year led Stripe to lay off roughly 14% of its staff in November. Patrick Collison wrote in a memo to employees that the company's leadership made "two very consequential mistakes" by misjudging how much the internet economy would grow in 2022 and 2023, and when it grew operating costs too quickly.
Those wider market challenges also led the company to trim its internal valuation to $63 billion from a peak of $95 in March 2021. In March, the company raised a new $6.5 billion funding round largely to provide liquidity to current and former employees at a valuation of $50 billion.
An IPO may still be in the cards for Stripe this year, which topped the CNBC Disruptor 50 list in 2020.
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