Stripe scores a major coup by becoming Kickstarter’s payments partner

7 Jan 2015

The Collison brothers’ Silicon Valley e-payments service Stripe has ousted Amazon Payments to facilitate transactions on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.

Kickstarter said that it will use Stripe’s technology to seamlessly collect and process payments for all projects on Kickstarter.

“We’ve already started moving projects over to the new system, and by next week, it will be in place for all new projects,” Kickstarter announced.

Kickstarter said the Stripe system will add new efficiencies, reducing payment processing set-up from days to minutes.

“For project creators, this means you won’t need to set up an Amazon Payments business account anymore. Instead, you’ll just enter your bank account details on the Account tab when you’re drafting your project on Kickstarter. It takes about two minutes, whereas the old way could take a few days.”

The deal is the latest coup for the Limerick brothers Silicon Valley start-up, having signed major e-commerce partnerships with Apple, Twitter and Facebook.

Limerick brothers build a US$3.5bn tech juggernaut

Patrick and John Collison’s company recently received a valuation of US$3.5bn after raising US$70m from new investor Thrive Capital along with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures.

Patrick (25) and John Collison (23) were recently listed in the Forbes top 30 under 30 people in tech. They formed a start-up called Shuppa in 2007, which later became known as Auctomatic, attracted funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Y Combinator, and was acquired just a year later by Canadian firm Live Current Media for $5m (€3.2m) when the brothers were just 17 and 19, respectively.

Stripe, an online payments engine that simplifies the purchase of content and goods on websites, raised its first round of funding of US$2m in March 2011 from investment veterans Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital and Andreesen Horowitz. This was followed by a further funding round of US$18m in February 2012 by Sequoia Capital that at the time valued their company at US$100m.

The company now employs 120 people.

Online payments image via Shutterstock

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

editorial@siliconrepublic.com