Stripe will open its first engineering center outside the United States in Dublin, the company told Reuters today. Dublin isn’t a surprising choice. Though the online payment processing provider is based in San Francisco, its founders are Irish and Stripe’s European headquarters are already in the Irish capital, where it has about 100 employees.
Reuters says Stripe will hire “a few dozen people” over the next few years to staff its new engineering hub and work on Stripe’s payment products.
Stripe’s first European launch was in 2013, when it became available in Ireland. The pace of its international expansion has picked up over the last couple of years, with the opening of its Dublin office and launches in Asia and key European markets including France and Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Its services are now available in 25 countries and it has about 1,000 employees worldwide.
Chief executive officer Patrick Collison (who founded Stripe in 2010 with his brother John) and head of engineering David Singleton told Reuters that Stripe initially considered hiring engineers in several European countries. They decided to create a hub in Ireland instead because the country has a “consistent approach of being outward looking and globally minded,” Collison said.
Questions over Britain’s post-Brexit future also influenced the decision.
“The decision was certainly not made by Brexit, but certainly when we were evaluating all the different countries across Europe the uncertainty was a factor,” Collison said.
Stripe last announced a funding round in November 2016, when it raised a $150 million Series D that gave it a $9.2 billion post-money valuation from returning investors General Catalyst and CapitalG (formerly Google Capital).