Brothers net $2m funding for web project

TWO IRISH brothers who became dotcom millionaires in their teens have received $2 million (€1.42 million) in backing from some of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors. It is understood this values their company at close to $20 million before it even launches a product.

Patrick (22) and John (20) Collison shot to prominence in 2008 when they sold their software company Auctomatic to a Canadian firm for a reported $5 million. The brothers have relocated to California to fund their latest venture, Stripe, which makes it simple for website operators to accept payments online.

When contacted yesterday, Patrick Collison declined to comment on who is funding the venture, but he confirmed that a number of organisations were already testing the company’s products in advance of its launch.

Mr Collison said he and John began working on the idea when they were respectively studying at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University in the US. They both relocated to Palo Alto, one of the main cities in Silicon Valley, to work on the business.

Among the high-profile executives understood to be investing in Stripe are Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal and sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.

Mr Thiel was an early investor in Facebook and sits on the social network’s board of directors. Andreessen Horowitz, a Californian venture capital firm with close to $1 billion in funds, has also seen the potential in Stripe.

It was founded by Marc Andreessen, the co-creator of Netscape Navigator, the first popular web browser and a former Timemagazine cover subject during the original dotcom boom. Sequoia Capital, one of the early backers of Google, has also contributed to the funding.

From Limerick, the Collison brothers showed an early aptitude for technology. Patrick won the BT Young Scientist of the Year competition in 2005 for his programming language, Croma, for the web. He took A-levels rather than the Leaving Cert to go to college sooner than otherwise possible. Then he was offered a place at MIT. Patrick deferred his studies to work on Auctomatic, which allowed users of websites such as eBay to manage their inventory. John was a transition-year student at Castletroy College when the firm was sold.