There isn’t much information out there about Stripe, a new payments startup cofounded by brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison (last seen selling their startup Auctomatic to Live Current Media for $5 million).
It’s an online business to business and business to consumer payments provider, we’ve confirmed. “How is it different than PayPal or Google Checkout?” I asked someone who’s seen the product. Their answer – “It doesn’t suck.”
Developers have a lot of trouble getting the various payments parts to work properly – from getting a merchant account to making the software work properly on your website. And then there is fee gouging. Stripe is said to make the process very, very easy for developers.
Apparently Stripe really doesn’t suck, because the company has taken approximately $2 million in a venture round from PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as well as Sequoia Capital, Andreesen Horowitz and SV Angel. Stripe was valued at around $20 million in the round, we’ve heard but haven’t confirmed. The company wouldn’t comment on whether or not the financing occurred at all.
Sequoia partner Michael Moritz is said to be personally involved in Stripe as well. He’s not known to spend a lot of time on startups he doesn’t think will have huge exits.
Stripe is a simple, developer-friendly way to accept payments online. They believe that enabling transactions on the web is a problem rooted in code, not finance, and they want to help put more websites in business.
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