Stripe takes part in major fundraising rounds for Stedi, PayMongo

Online payments company is emerging as a key backer of promising start-ups

Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison.
Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison.

Stripe, the online payments company founded by Patrick and John Collison, is continuing to ramp up investments in promising start-ups, recently participating in two big funding rounds.

It is one of 11 investors to back Stedi, a US data interchange company, which has just raised $50.1 million (€43m). Stripe has also this week led a $12 million Series A round for the Philippines-headquartered online payment platform, PayMongo.

These are not the first investments made by Stripe, which has also backed the likes of digital challenger Monzo Bank and Nigerian payments start-up Paystack. It also led a $22.5 million funding round for Step, a mobile banking start-up aimed at teenagers, last year.

Stedi, which was founded in 2017 by Zack Kanter, has raised more than $70 million to date. The Colorado-based company has developed a messaging platform for business transactions.

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Manila-based PayMongo is a fintech that has developed an online payments platform that has been in demand during the Covid-crisis. The company has 9,000 businesses on the platform and has seen transactions jump significantly in recent months.

Stripe, which was valued at nearly $36 billion after raising an additional $600 million from backers earlier this year, was founded by the Collison brothers in 2010. It employs more than 2,800 people globally, including about 300 in Ireland.

It announced last week that it now has more than 40 large companies that process over $1 billion annually as customers.

Charlie Taylor

Charlie Taylor

Charlie Taylor is a former Irish Times business journalist