The Best Fin-Tech Stock has Yet to go Public

Forget whatever you think you know about IPOs, Coinbase and Robinhood just aren’t very unique companies. Stripe is the by far the most important Fin-Tech company since Square. Stripe has raised a $600 million Series H funding round that boosts its valuation to $95 billion and wants to invest in Europe more.

It was last valued at $36 billion from April 2020, according to PitchBook data. Stripe is a candidate to be one of the next BigTech companies the way it has scaled since it was founded.

Will Stripe Become the “Apple of Finance”?

Stripe will go IPO around 2023. Stripe is becoming the “Apple of Finance” and has long kept its cards to its chest when it comes to user numbers, revenues, and profit and those details, once again, are not being disclosed with the news today, and nor has it made any comments on IPO plans.

BigTech was supposed to disrupt the banks in the 2030s, but at this rate Fin-Tech companies like Square, Ant Financial, Stripe and Chime among others might do it instead.

Founded more than a decade ago, today Stripe is by far the most valuable private fintech company. By delaying its IPO, it’s actually more hotly anticipated by the public markets.

Stripe has seen eye-popping growth during the pandemic as its revenue is largely tied to growth in online shopping. Just as PayPal and Square are evolving, so is Stripe.

Primary investors in the new series H round include Allianz X, Fidelity, Sequoia Capital and Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA). Even Tesla and Elon Musk have invested in them (2014 article!).

Talk about perfect timing, founded in 2010 by John and his brother Patrick Collison (the CEO), Stripe is one of a wave of commerce startups that saw the value of building a simple way for developers to integrate payments into any app or site by way of a few lines of code, at a time when digital and specifically online payments were starting to take off. Stripe sugar-daddied on the E-commerce boom.

What Shopify is to E-commerce of small businesses, Stripe is to their payments. In 2007, when the brothers were coding their APIs, online payments were supposed to have been solved. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin founded PayPal in 1998, which was bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

But real innovation always simplifies how real world problems are solved. Many believe the best is yet to come for Stripe.