Stripe, the digital payments company that helped drive Apple Pay s success, has raised $70 million in new funding, making it the 14th most valuable startup in the world.
Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital led the round, which values Stripe at about $3.5 billion. The company s market cap is now about $1 billion more than that of popular cloud storage company Box, and is just shy of the valuations for Lending Club and Spotify, according to data from Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal.
San Francisco-based Stripe previously garnered about $80 million from investors including venture capital firms Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. The company offers processing services for online and mobile transactions and provides code for software programmers to incorporate payment features into smartphone apps. For startups such as Lyft, Instacart and Postmates, Stripe has been the preferred choice of payments provider to its much larger competitor PayPal.
The financing follows a flurry of deals that has catapulted Stripe to a high-profile leader in digital payments. In September, Stripe was named as a partner of Apple s new mobile-payments service, Apple Pay, which has seen great success in its first months. Stripe is also powering e-commerce features for Twitter and Facebook, and recently partnered with Alipay, the payments branch of China s behemoth the Alibaba Group.
Stripe was founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison.
There should be much more commerce happening online, Patrick Collison said in an interview with the New York Times. This 1990s add to cart model we have today isn t everything that commerce should be.
