Stripe raises another $600m in funding

Fintech firm Stripe has raised $600m in a funding round that places its value at $95 billion.

The move will fuel further expansion in Europe for the fast-growing company, which is increasingly targeting large enterprise customers.

The money came primarily from insurance companies Allianz and Axa, with other backers, including Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management and Research Company, Sequoia Capital, and the Irish National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA).

The company has committed much of the funding to expand its European operations, where it already operates in 31 countries. Stripe launched support for companies in the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta, in May 2020. Ireland, where it has one of its dual headquarters, will be a focal point, according to its president and co-founder John Collison.

Outside Europe, Stripe will also expand operations in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the UAE.

Stripe will expand its Global Payments and Treasury Network (GPTN), the foundation for a range of services it’s been launching to capture greater parts of the payment chain. These include accepting and making payments and storing and managing them.

The company began focusing on smaller, startup-stage companies, providing them with a way to integrate payments easily into their applications. Over time, it’s expanded to court larger companies with a range of additional enterprise features.

In 2018, it added a set of anti-fraud tools called Radar. It also launched a platform for companies to issue Mastercard and Visa credit cards during the same year. In late 2020, it announced Stripe Treasury, a banking-as-a-service API2 that provides its clients' banking services. Initial partners for the service included Goldman Sachs and Evolve Bank in the US.

This latest fundraising follows a $250 million Series G funding round that Stripe started in September 2019 that put its value at $35 billion. It extended that round and included General Catalyst, Sequoia, and Andreesen Horowitz to raise another $600 million in April 2020.