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Building a $95 Billion Company: Stripe Case Study

Stripe Background: How Stripe was started

Stripe is a technology company that provides payment processing software and APIs for e-commerce businesses of all sizes. Stripe was founded by John and Patrik Collison, two brothers from rural Ireland who revolutionized the online payment industry. Both of them were academically gifted and were interested in math and physics. Lets talk about Stripe case study.

stripe case study

John and Patrik started their first business “Auctomatic” which solves problems on Ebay. Later they sold the company for $5Million dollars.While studying at MIT and building apps for the App store they found a gap in the market. They found it’s really hard to get customers money,  also several other setups, waiting periods, fees etc. So they dropped out of college and built Stripe. 

What made Stripe stand out?

It’s because of the platform software. It allows businesses to accept payments without needing banking licenses or deals with credit card industries. This approach attracts people’s attention and also they got their first initial funding around $20k-$30k from YCombinator. They also approached high profile individuals like Elon Musk and Peter thiel. 

Once John said “It’s a little impetuous to go to Paypal founders and say the payments on the internet are totally broken”

Who were early investors in Stripe?

In 2011,  led by Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital  and Anndressenn Horowitz helped stripe gain traction. Their threshold of billion dollars crossed in 2014 after the Series C round. And its last round, series H of $600million at a whopping $95 Billion dollars valuation. 

Growth and Expansion

Key Features

Stripe makes a really great developer centric design. It’s easy to integrate APIs features that make them popular among developers. They try to enable businesses to  operate in multiple currencies and countries. If any country doesn’t allow users to have an international payment process. They help them to build a dummy office in the US so that they can create Stripe accounts for international payment. You can use stripe to get your money from google adsense and other international payments. Even nowadays many freelancers and small agencies create stripe accounts to receive money from their clients. They also provide real time insights to their transactions. 

Partnership

Stripe strategically partnered with many big giants like Shopify and Amazon. 

Shopify: Stripe became Shopify’s backbone of payments. Shopify has nearly 16.93% market share in the ecommerce space. That’s a huge leap for Stripe. Shopify is the best platform to create an ecommerce website for any brand. And it has a big share in the US, UK and Canadian market. 

Amazon: They started powering Amazon marketplace payments in 2017. Till now it’s going really great. 

How Stripe made money? 

As of now, Stripe has 50 corporate clients that each process more than $1 billion annually. Stripe makes money through transaction fees. These include fees for online transactions, subscription billing, invoicing, connecting clients that pay through third-party sellers, and in-person point of sale payments.

Stripe also makes revenue through its Stripe Capital Service business loans, its Radar product, and custom finance and data analysis reports.As of 2024 , it is still not listed on NYSE.

Conclusion about Stripe case study

Stripe is one of the most exciting companies in the world right now. The company started with a simple idea to improve e-commerce payments, and they’ve grown into a massive, multi-billion dollar business. The fact that so many investors have shown so much interest in Stripe is a sign that the company still has a huge future ahead.

What do you think of the company’s journey through the years? Let us know in the comments below.

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