Stripe's value soars to US$95B, become the most expensive

Patrick Collison, chief executive officer and co-founder of Stripe Inc., left, smiles as John Collison, president and co-founder of Stripe Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Studio 1.0 television interview in San Francisco, California, U.S.Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Online payment company Stripe Inc drew US$600 million in its latest fundraising, bringing the startup's value to US$95 billio, exceeding SpaceX becomes the most valuable private startup in Silicon Valley.

Revenue up 50% during pandemic

Stripe was founded in 2010, and this growth was largely driven by the wave of online shopping during the epidemic. Stripe provides payment processing services for e-commerce platforms and science and technology companies, and these institutions have seen a significant increase in transaction volume during the epidemic. Last year, they processed more than $200 billion in transactions, an annual increase of 50%. Its main customers include enterprise software companies Zoom, Salesforce and Atlassian, food delivery platform DoorDash and e-commerce platform Shopify. Stripe said its system will process nearly 5,000 service requests per second in 2020, including payments, refunds, customer data checks and other queries.

Valuation lags behind ant byte beating

Stripe's latest valuation has more than doubled from the valuation of US$35.4 billion obtained in the previous round of financing in April last year, surpassing the valuations of US$80 billion and US$72 billion before the listing of Facebook and Uber, respectively. . However, if you calculate the global unicorns, Stripe's valuation still lags behind TikTok's parent company ByteDance's $180 billion valuation and the $108 billion valuation of Ant Group whose IPO hit the rocks.

In addition, the food delivery platform Deliveroo confirmed that the London IPO plans to raise about 1 billion pounds (about 10.8 billion Hong Kong dollars), which will become one of the largest IPOs in London in recent years. In the last round of financing, Hu Husong was valued at more than 7 billion U.S. dollars.

Earlier this month, online grocery delivery company Instacart Inc also raised US$265 million in the latest round of financing, raising its valuation to US$39 billion. Institutions participating in this round of financing include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Investments, and Puxin Group. Instacart Finance Director Nick Giovanni said that the proceeds from the fund-raising will be used to strengthen the business, and plans to increase its staff by 50% this year. He continued that the largest retail business in the United States is grocery sales, and its annual consumption is as high as 1.3 trillion US dollars.

Value of fintech is rising  

Tang Zuyin, manager of the first gold global AI FinTech financial technology fund, said that AI artificial intelligence and network technology bring high convenience and accessibility advantages, provide key elements for the rapid development of the financial technology industry, and give birth to many new innovations. Companies, such as Stripe, Ant Group, Paypal, Checkout, Square, etc., attract the attention of global investors.

Ark Investment ARK estimates that global fintech users will grow to 230 million in 2025, services will also deepen from simple payment to loans, insurance, investment and other businesses, and the average transaction amount per user will reach 19,900 US dollars. The overall market size is US$4.6 trillion.

Tang Zuyin pointed out that after the integration of financial services into innovative technologies such as AI and the Internet, it can create new growth momentum for customers and unexpected new businesses that have not been reached in the past. Take the FTSE customized financial technology index companies as an example. The earnings per share forecast for this year and next will have double-digit growth rates. Investment opportunities should not be missed.