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You're so wrong if you think Stripe is just a payments company.
It's a whole self-contained universe.
This is part eight in our Charts & Crafts series explaining top private tech companies.
I never quite understood how literal Stripe's motto, increasing the GDP of the internet, was.
Let me explain.
Stripe was founded by two brothers who grew up in rural Ireland, Patrick and John Collison, to fix a pain point from their earlier company, accepting payments online.
Before Stripe, if you wanted to sell t-shirts online, you'd build a website, then grind through a set of five or more clunky steps behind the scenes.
You'd set up a merchant account, which takes weeks of paperwork, install a payment gateway, plug into a payment processor, pass PCI compliance, and add a fraud detection system.
Their solution was to put all of that mess into a tidy single product, one any developer could install with just seven lines of code.
This created a boom in economic activity because suddenly, far more people could sell things online.
The scale of that boom is kind of mind-blowing.
In 2024, 1.4 trillion flowed through Stripe, about 1.3% of the entire planet's GDP.
Last year, that hit 1.9 trillion, 1.6% of global GDP.
So at its core, yes, Stripe is a payments business.
But on top, they've built a whole universe of products that reinforce them as a central hub for every business on the internet.
You can incorporate on Stripe, add revenue products like billing and tax, manage your money, and then do some frontier stuff like stablecoins and AI agents.
Together, there's a beautiful flywheel effect, from a company's birth through global scale.
But the Collison brothers have always had higher order missions too, that wrap around all of these businesses.
And I think that flywheel shows the true soul of Stripe.
Supported by the primary businesses, they've built some surprising ones.
Stripe Press, a real, physical book publishing house.
Public goods, which includes nearly 2 billion to jumpstart carbon removal, and 500 million to fund research to eliminate respiratory disease.
And Progress studies, a whole intellectual movement to understand how technology and society can actually advance together.
All of these reflect the ethos of two brothers who've seen Stripe as an economic utility more than a payments company.
Stripe is famously still private.
It raised just 2.2 billion at $159 billion valuation.
And it's meaningfully profitable too, with an estimated 6 billion in revenue just last year.
Unsurprisingly, Stripe is a founder factory.
More than 170 companies have been created by its alumni, including OpenAI by Greg Brockman, who is Stripe employee number four, and Anthropic by Daniela Amodei, who is Stripe employee number 45.
There's a reason the Collison brothers are Valley legends.
They're more like directors of this whole Stripe cinematic universe.
Part 8: Stripe is one of the most fabled companies in Silicon Valley, and it’s so much more than a payments company…
#stripe #fintech #startup #venturecapital #technology