THE NEW VENTURE of two Limerick brothers, aged 23 and 21, has been valued at around $100 million after its latest round of private fundraising, it has been reported.
Bloomberg says Stripe, an online payments system which allows consumers to accept online credit card payments, has attracted $18 million in funding from groups including venture capitalists Sequoia Capital.
The report claims Sequoia – which has previously invested in the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Apple, Cisco, PayPal, YouTube and LinkedIn – contributed $17 million of those funds.
The Stripe product is aimed at allowing retails to set up online stores without having to set up an account with a merchant bank, or deal with the slippery business of having to safely secure credit card details.
Other previous investors in the company include Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist best known for being the co-founder and first CEO of PayPal, and for being one of the first investors in Facebook.
Stripe was set up by brothers Patrick and John Collison, Limerick brothers who already have experience in selling technology startups: in 2007 they found ‘Shuppa’ (pronounced as in ‘siopa‘), a software product that helped people to optimise sales on the likes of eBay.
That company merged with a similar firm set up by two Britons and was later sold to Canadian firm Live Current Media for $5 million, making the brothers overnight millionaires. The pair now live in Palo Alto, California, working full-time on Stripe.
Patrick is a former winner of the BT Young Scientist competition, taking the top prize in 2005 after creating a new dialect of the LISP family of programming languages. He went on to take the top prize at the European competition.
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