Stripe, the online payments company founded by the Limerick-born Collison brothers, has raised $245 million in a new funding round.
The latest investment, which was led by Tiger Global, values the fast-growing company at $20 billion.
Other participants in the latest funding round included DST Global and Sequoia. Among the other backers of Stripe are Visa, American Express, Peter Thiel and Tesla founder Elon Musk.
Chief executive and co-founder Patrick Collison said the company would use the new funds to accelerate its international growth, particularly in Asia where it has just announced a new engineering hub in Singapore.
Stripe, which currently operates in 25 countries , is intent on building a distributed global engineering team and has hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, and Dublin, the last of which opened recently.
Mr Collison said only 3 per cent of global commerce is online although that number is expected to grow to $4 trillion by 2020.
Massive opportunity
He said more than 500 million people in southeast Asia and India are expected to move online in the next three years, providing businesses face a massive opportunity to tap into the globalisation of online commerce.
“Better global payments infrastructure will increase economic output, encourage entrepreneurship, and help upstarts compete with incumbents,” said Mr Collison.
“By bringing Stripe into more markets and building out our capabilities for companies of all sizes, we hope to accelerate innovation around the world,” he added.
Stripe, which was founded by the Collisons in 2009, employs more than 1,000 people globally and handles billions of dollars in transactions each year.
The company offers payment-processing services for online and mobile transactions. It supports credit-card payments in more than 130 currencies, bank transfers, Alipay and WeChat Pay.
Stripe started off securing small clients but now counts companies such as Macy’s, GE, Adidas, Docusign, Slack, Nasdaq and the NFL among its customers.
The company on Wednesday announced a number of new customer wins including Uber, Google, Mindbody and Spotify.
