Stripe is a financial infrastructure company that builds the software businesses use to accept payments and move money online. Founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, it grew from a small set of developer tools into a platform that millions of companies rely on, from one-person stores to large public corporations. Stripe keeps its operations split across two main locations: South San Francisco, California, and Dublin, Ireland.
The company is privately held and has stayed that way through years of rapid growth. A February 2026 tender offer that let employees sell shares valued Stripe at roughly $159 billion, up from about $106 billion a year earlier, according to reporting in The Irish Times. That figure makes it one of the most valuable venture-backed companies in the world.
What Stripe does
At its core, Stripe sells the plumbing that connects a business to the global payment system. When a customer enters a card number on a website or app, Stripe handles the technical work of authorizing the charge, routing it through card networks and banks, and settling the funds. The company exposes this through programming interfaces, so a developer can add a checkout flow without negotiating directly with banks or card networks.
Over time the product expanded well beyond a single payment button. Stripe now covers recurring billing, invoicing, in-person card readers, fraud screening, tax calculation, and tools for platforms that need to pay out third parties. The common thread is that each piece is designed to be added with code and to work alongside the others, which is part of why companies often adopt one Stripe product and then layer on more.
The Collison brothers and the founding
Patrick and John Collison grew up in County Tipperary, Ireland, and both showed an early interest in programming. Before Stripe, they built and sold an earlier company, which gave them firsthand experience with how difficult it was to take payments on the web. That frustration became the starting point for Stripe, which they launched in 2010 while still in their early twenties.
Patrick Collison serves as chief executive and John Collison as president, and the two have run the company together since the beginning. Their account of how the business started, and the broader story of its growth, is documented in the company profile maintained by Wikipedia. The brothers have kept Stripe independent rather than pursuing an early public listing, a choice that has shaped how the company raises money and rewards employees.
The product suite
Stripe organizes its offerings into a set of named products that businesses can mix and match. Payments remains the foundation, but several others have become significant in their own right. Billing manages subscriptions and usage-based pricing, Connect lets software platforms route payments to many sellers or service providers, and Radar uses machine learning to flag fraudulent transactions.
Beyond those, Stripe offers Terminal for accepting in-person card payments, Issuing for creating and managing payment cards, Sigma for querying transaction data, and Tax for calculating and collecting sales tax and VAT. Businesses that want to embed financial services into their own products frequently combine several of these. Stripe also appears in broader operational playbooks, including roundups such as our guide to business process automation examples, where payment and billing workflows are common candidates for automation.
Scale and customers
Stripe processes payments for a wide span of businesses, and its customer list ranges from early-stage startups to established enterprises. The company has said that platforms built on its Connect product alone support millions of underlying businesses, and its fraud tools screen transactions for companies across many industries and countries.
Public reporting and the company's own annual updates describe customers that include large technology firms, retailers, and a growing roster of artificial intelligence companies that use Stripe to bill for their services. That mix reflects how broadly online payments now reach, and it helps explain why Stripe is often cited as a default choice when a new company needs to start collecting money.
Funding and why it matters
Stripe has raised money from prominent venture and growth investors across many rounds, and it has used tender offers to give employees liquidity without going public. The February 2026 valuation of about $159 billion, reported by Silicon Republic, came through one of these employee share sales rather than an initial public offering.
The company's trajectory matters beyond its own balance sheet because so much online commerce depends on the kind of infrastructure Stripe provides. For founders comparing tools, payment setup often sits alongside other early financial decisions, such as choosing where to hold company funds; readers weighing those choices can see our overview of the best business bank account for an LLC. Stripe's position as a widely used default gives it influence over how new businesses get paid.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Stripe and when?
Stripe was founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison. Patrick is the chief executive and John is the president.
Where is Stripe headquartered?
Stripe operates from two main locations: South San Francisco, California, in the United States, and Dublin, Ireland.
What does Stripe actually do?
Stripe provides software that lets businesses accept online and in-person payments, run subscription billing, screen for fraud, calculate tax, and move money to third parties through products such as Payments, Billing, Connect, and Radar.
How much is Stripe worth?
A tender offer in February 2026 valued Stripe at roughly $159 billion, up from about $106 billion a year earlier. The company remains privately held.