Stripe becomes America's most valuable startup thanks to its high "stoxygen" factor
Move over, Technoking... Stripe has officially surpassed Elon's SpaceX to become the most valuable private startup (ironically, Elon is a Stripe investor... so he wins anyway). The digital payments unicorn now has 95 horns, after raising $600M in fresh funding at a chunky $95B valuation. That's nearly 3X its last reported valuation from April 2020. For reference: Facebook's last valuation before going public was ~$83B.
95 (invisible) horns... You don't see Stripe, but you've probably used it while paying for something online. Stripe allows companies to quickly transfer credit card payments directly into their biz bank accounts.
- Millions of companies of all sizes use Stripe's software to accept payments and manage their financials. Stripe makes money by charging fees for each transaction. Competitors include: Adyen, PayPal, and Square.
- 89%: The probability that your credit card has been used on Stripe's network. Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, Spotify, Zoom, and Glossier are all Stripe customers.
- Stripe's mission is "to increase the GDP of the internet" (read: get more people to pay for stuff online). It wants to be the backbone of ecommerce growth.
Stripe is a "stoxygen" company... Stoxygen factor = how necessary a company is to other companies, and how invisible it is to customers. Like oxygen, Stripe's payments software is crucial and invisible — and it's everywhere in the online economy. Other business-to-business stoxygen companies: Amazon's AWS (cloud computing), Shopify (ecommerce payments), and Salesforce (customer support). The wild thing: all those "invisible" companies use Stripe's stoxygen, too. As the online economy continues to grow, Stripe is poised to grow with it.