FinTech news in stripe category

Digital payments company Stripe announced Wednesday that it raised over $6.5 billion in Series I funding to value the company at $50 billion. Two months ago, journalist reported that Stripe had cut its internal valuation to $63 billion.

Earlier this year, journalist reported that Thrive Capital was said to have committed $1 billion in fresh capital to Stripe as part of a new investment in the works that would have valued the fintech company at between $55 billion and $60 billion

Founded by Irish brothers John and his brother Patrick Collison (the CEO), Stripe has raised more than $2.2 billion in funding since its 2010 inception from investors such as Allianz (via its Allianz X fund), Axa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Base Partners, GV and an investor from the founders’ home country, Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA). Thrive Capital has reportedly committed $1 billion in fresh capital to payments giant Stripe as part of a new investment in the works that would value the fintech company at between $55 billion and $60 billion. journalist reported last week that Stripe was seeking to raise $2 billion but the number could actually be closer to $2.5 billion to $3 billion, according to reports from the New York Times and The Information. Also, journalist recently reported on how new fintech startup Mayfair is paying Stripe a fee as part of its mission to offer businesses a higher yield on their cash.

Fintech startup Stripe has set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing, or pursue a transaction on the private market, such as a fundraising event and a tender offer, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The company new fiat-to-crypto widget can be embedded in any crypto product so that users can enter their card information and acquire crypto that can be used in another web3 product. The payment company handles KYC, payments, fraud and compliance so that crypto companies can focus on crypto instead of competing with Stripe. When a user wants to buy crypto, Stripe’s widget asks you how much you want to spend in your fiat currency — the company adds fees on top of that. After the FTX debacle, products like Ramp, MoonPay and Stripe’s fiat-to-crypto widget are going to be essential.

Stripe has laid off some of the employees that support TaxJar, a tax compliance startup that it acquired last year. In July, Stripe went through a 409A valuation process that saw its internal valuation cut by 28%. Stripe’s new and lower internal valuation, explained Fintech hasn’t been immune from the downturn – for evidence, you need to look no further than the stock prices of Block (formerly Square) PayPal, Robinhood and Affirm.

Unlike Stripe, Klarna’s valuation was cut by its investors – which include Sequoia, Silver Lake, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the UAE’s sovereign fund Mubadala Investment Company and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments). The Journal reports that the valuation cut comes from a 409a price change, which means that Stripe hasn’t decreased the value of preferred shares sold in the last round.

Wave, an African fintech that offers mobile money services in Senegal and Ivory Coast, laid off about 15% of its workforce last month. Thus, the layoffs affected almost 300 employees, most of whom worked in Wave’s new markets: Burkina Faso, Mali and Uganda. The Senegal-based startup likely has enough money in the bank for the next few years, and last week, it secured a €90 million syndicated loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Lendable, Norfund and other lenders in one of the largest debt deals on the continent. journalist first got a whiff of the layoff news on LinkedIn, where Jessica Chervin, a former Andela executive who joined Wave as an expansion lead in March, wrote that she was leaving the company.

Affirm — which was founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin — has built technology that can underwrite individual transactions, and once determining a customer is eligible offer them the option to pay on a biweekly or monthly basis. Some customers are in fact charged interest but Affirm says it doesn’t charge late fees and that there are no surprises with the amount of interest it charges. In an interview earlier this year, Libor Michalek, Affirm’s president of technology emphasized the company’s efforts to be transparent.

Finix is not coming out of nowhere. The SaaS startup — which started out in early 2020 by selling its payments tech to other businesses — raised a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia.

Stripe’s launch of its new Financial Connections product. The product launch in and of itself was newsworthy, yes. But what elevated it in the world of newsworthiness was that it sparked some controversy, as it is pretty much exactly what Plaid, a one-time partner of Stripe’s, does

Those updates to Stripe’s ACH Debit product were a hint of the news today considering that it was launched with the ability to instantly verify bank accounts, a feature that is competitive with Plaid’s Auth product.

Payments giant Stripe already powers a pretty major swath of the web financial infrastructure, now it’s launching crypto payments support to give customers an easier path to onboard web3 users and interact with cryptocurrencies.

So far, VCs have been a strong customer acquisition channel for Arc, noted Lombardo, who pointed to the fact that Arc’s largest partnership today is with Y Combinator, which is promoting Arc across its portfolio of thousands of software companies.

Checkout.com is building a full-stack payments company — it acts as a gateway, an acquirer, a risk engine and a payment processor.