Stripe snaps up US engineering analytics firm Okay

1 Jun 2023

Image: © MichaelVi/Stock.adobe.com

Okay said Stripe will use the start-up’s technology to support its engineering teams, while the deal marks Stripe’s first acquisition since January 2022.

Stripe is back in the buying market with the acquisition of Okay, a US analytics platform for engineering teams.

Okay was founded in 2019 and said its platform can identify the “bottlenecks” affecting the day-to-day activities of engineers. The company’s platform features pre-made dashboards to let teams analyse specific data, such as incidents or various performance metrics.

The company participated in the prestigious Y Combinator and managed to raise $6.6m in capital, TechCrunch reports.

The US company said Stripe plans to use Okay’s technology and expertise to benefit the fintech giant’s own engineering teams. The terms of the deal were not disclosed by either company.

Okay co-founders Antoine Boulanger and Tomas Barreto said investing in “engineering effectiveness and developer experience” has become more important as companies become more “tech enabled”.

“Over the years, we have proven our method with thousands of engineers and at many Silicon Valley unicorns,” Boulanger and Barreto said in a blog post. “Now, we’ll be bringing this approach to the Stripe [engineering] team. Our values and philosophy on engineering effectiveness are a great match with Stripe, which is why we could not be more excited to join forces.”

This marks Stripe’s first acquisition in roughly 16 months, since it bought card reader provider BBPOS in January 2022.

The Irish-founded fintech giant raised more than $6.5bn in March, and said this finance would be used to provide liquidity for its current and former employees, and address “employee withholding tax obligations related to equity awards”.

This funding round slashed Stripe’s valuation to $50bn, which is almost half of the record $95bn valuation the company achieved in 2021 after raising $600m. Stripe had lowered its internal valuation to $74bn last July amid a stock market downturn in the tech sector.

Last November, Stripe announced plans to cut 14pc of its workforce to prepare for “leaner times”, citing issues such as inflation, interest rates and rising energy costs.

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Leigh Mc Gowran is a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com