Stripe: $9.2bn start-up built on seven lines of code
Despite the explosive growth of e-commerce across the world, the technology behind its finance structure is decades old. In 2010, two brothers from rural Ireland started modernizing this process, and founded a start-up called Stripe which enabled businesses and individuals to connect directly into credit card and banking systems and receive payments. Now Stripe, worth $9.2 billion, has partnered with Amazon.
Stripe's growth trajectory
Three years ago, in 2014, Stripe had a mere 80 employees. In contrast, today, Stripe has 750 employees, and is the financial engine of over 100,000 business handling what is estimated to be over $50 billion in transactions annually.
The origins of Stripe
Stripe was founded by Patrick and John Collison. Born to parents with a scientific background in a village in central Ireland, both the brothers excelled in school. Patrick got into MIT in 2006, and John followed him to America and got into Harvard in 2008. They made iPhone Apps in their spare time, and dropped out in 2009 to form what would become Stripe.
A little goes a long way
Stripe arguably revolutionized online payments with its approach. In order for a site to be able to handle online transactions, all a business or an individual had to do was to add seven lines of code to their site.
Despite its success, Stripe is facing stiff competition
Stripe's technology was an instant hit with Silicon Valley bigshots like Facebook, Lyft, Door Dash etc. which looked to make Stripe the backbone of their financial operations. Consequently, Stripe now handles billions of dollars worth of online transactions daily, and earns its revenue from a small fee it charges on transactions. However, Stripe is now facing stiff competition from bigshots like Google and Apple.
Stripe's competition
Stripe's direct competition includes the likes of PayPal-subsidiary Braintree Payment Solutions LLC, the Dutch company Ayden B.V., Square Inc., Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC, and First Data Corp.
What the Amazon partnership means for Stripe
With similar services from competitors, Stripe's partnership with Amazon could be a massive move which establishes the dominance of Stripe. A couple of weeks back Stripe had started handling a large, but undisclosed, amount of Amazon's transactions. While neither company commented on the scope of the partnership, the deal could help Stripe greatly increase its transaction volume, thereby establishing its dominance.
