Two brothers, John and Patrick Collison founded a company in 2010. The company they created was first called /dev/payments. This name caused much confusion to consumers and potential investors so the brothers decided to name their company Stripe. Stripe is a company that allows different companies to integrate payment processing into their websites without having to register and maintain a merchant account. Their company focuses on fraud prevention, and the banking infrastructure required to create an online payment system. Stripe has known grown to a company that operates in over 25 countries for both business and individuals alike.
Stripe wasn’t built solely on the capital that John and Patrick Collison had; instead they received their first investment in June 2010 from a start-up accelerator called Y Combinator. The company then went on to receive further investment from venture capitalists Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz for roughly 2 million dollars. The company then in 2012 received 18 million dollars more from Sequoia Capital at a 100 million dollar valuation. Stripe has since picked up other notable investors such as Elon Musk.
In 2016, Stripe was ranked the four on the Forbes Cloud 100, a list of companies that engage in cloud computing. That same year, John and Patrick became the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, and they were worth at least 1.1 billion dollars. This occurred after receiving an investment from CapitalG and General Catalyst that valued the company at 9.2 billion dollars.
That is a very good business idea as globalization leads to people needing to be able to verify the authenticity of the payments they are making. These two brothers also having a mentor in an investor like Peter Thiel is also an asset for their company as he has been involved in silicon valley for decades and can help guide them.