Stripe makes third acquisition as it buys Indie Hackers

Stripe, the fast-growing online payments firm established by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison, has acquired Indie Hackers for an undisclosed sum.

Indie Hackers is a knowledge-sharing community for entrepreneurs which was established by Courtland Allen less than a year ago.

News of the acquisition, Stripe’s third deal after previously acquiring Kickoff in March 2013 and Tonic in September 2016, was announced by Mr Allen in a blog post on the Indie Hackers website. It was later officially confirmed by Stripe.

In a subsequent post published on hackernews, Patrick Collison said the company's goal in acquiring Indie Hackers was to ensure it becomes as successful as possible.

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“The Stripe upside we’re hoping for is that more companies get started and that they’re more successful. We already see a very large fraction of new internet companies choose Stripe; we’re mainly hoping that Indie Hackers can help us grow the overall number rather than to grow our fraction. (Our product has to do the latter part.),” he wrote.

Following the acquisition, Mr Allen is joining Stripe as a full-time employee but will continue to work exclusively on Indie Hackers. His brother Channing Allen also joins the company to assist on the website.

Payment processing

Stripe, which was founded in 2009, offers payment processing services for online and mobile transactions. It supports credit-card payments in more than 130 different currencies, bank transfers, Bitcoin and Alipay.

The company, whose backers include Sequoia Capital and PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, is valued at $9 billion, based on a recent fundraising round. In November, the group announced it had raised $150 million in a series D round led by CapitalG and General Catalyst, with existing investors such as Sequoia also involved.

The San Francisco-headquartered company, which employs more than 500 people globally, now operates in 25 countries, including Japan, where it recently officially opened for business.

It has users in 110 countries and counts firms such as Macy's, Bloomingdale's, GE, Adidas, DocuSign, Slack, Nasdaq and the NFL among its customers.