Peter Thiel invests in Collison brothers’ latest venture Stripe

29 Mar 2011

Early Facebook investor and PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel, as well as Tesla’s Elon Musk, who also co-founded PayPal, along with top Silicon Valley VCs have invested US$2m in Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison’s latest venture.

The Collison brothers (pictured) became an overnight sensation two years ago when at the ages of just 19 and 17 Patrick and John sold their first company Auctomatic to Canadian firm Live Current Media for $5m (€3.2m).

Their latest venture, Stripe, is a new payments start-up that focuses on online business-to-business payments.

According to TechCrunch, the company has taken in a venture round of US$2m from Thiel and Musk, as well as Sequoia Capital, Andreesen Horowitz and SV Angel.

The company is understood to be valued at US$20m.

According to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, Sequoia partner Michael Moritz is involved in Stripe.

“He’s not known to spend a lot of time on start-ups he doesn’t think will have huge exits,” Arrington wrote.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com