Stripe hits $95B valuation, is now Silicon Valley’s most precious private company

Online payment platform Stripe became Silicon Valley’s most valuable private company with its latest funding round.

The company announced on Sunday that it has raised $600 million from Allianz X, Axa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sequoia Capital, and Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), taking its valuation to a gargantuan $95 billion. 

As the Financial Times noted, the 11-year-old company has surpassed the valuation of Facebook and Uber before they went public. In relation to other private startups, Stripe leads trading platform Robinhood, which is currently valued at $11.7 billion, by a massive margin.

Stripe raised a round of $600 million last April that valued the payment company at $35 billion.

The firm provides an easy way for businesses to integrate payment solutions into their websites — just like PayPal. Stripe has received praise for its developer-friendly tools and easy integration methods. A ton of top companies including Amazon, Github, Yelp, Spotify, and Uber use the company’s solutions for processing payments.

Stripe saw great growth last year due to a rise in digital payments because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the FT noted, the business added more than 200,000 European companies to the platform since the start of the pandemic, handling almost 5,000 requests per second.

With this fresh round of funding, the company wants to invest more in its European operation and expand its global payments and treasury network. It’s also investing in infrastructure that will help it shape online payment solutions for the next decade.