Stripe launches in eight new European countries

10 Sep 2019

Patrick and John Collison. Image: Stripe

This morning Stripe announced an EMEA expansion that will be driven from its Dublin offices, as well as two new products and a new senior leader.

Today (10 September), Irish-founded tech company Stripe announced that it will officially launch its services in eight new European countries.

The payments platform will now be available in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Portugal and Greece. Businesses in these countries can start accepting payments in more than 130 currencies in as little as 10 minutes.

In addition to accepting payments, companies can use Stripe to handle accounting, billing, payments to third parties and optimise mobile payments – all from one centralised dashboard. Users also get access to mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Stripe noted that Eastern Europe has one of the highest densities of software developers in the world, with 1.3 developers for every 100 people in the overall workforce.

A view of four Stripe workers from above. Three are using laptops and another is writing in a notebook.

Stripe engineers collaborating. Image: Stripe

In a statement, Stripe’s head of central and eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, Felix Huber, said: “Central and Eastern Europe has a lot of entrepreneurial and technological talent, and we believe even more of its companies could be expanding globally.

“Stripe aims to empower more companies from this region to export their creativity and ambition to the rest of the world.”

This expansion will be heavily driven from the company’s Dublin office, which is its fastest-growing office and its first international engineering hub.

New products

Last week, the company launched Stripe Capital. The new service enables small and emerging businesses running on the platform to avail of loans.

Stripe Capital allows borrowers to “repay as they earn”, meaning repayments can come through a small business’s future sales made through the platform, and loan amounts and repayments will be predicated on the customer’s transaction activity on Stripe itself. At present, Stripe Capital is only available to customers in the US

The firm is also launching the Stripe Corporate Card. Users can avail of this to manage their employees’ corporate spending.

A man with red hair and a blue shirt on stands beside another man in a dark blue shirt, with dark hair. Together they look at Mac computer screen as if they are trying to solve a problem.

Stripe’s user operations team. Image: Stripe

New senior leader

Stripe also announced the appointment of Irish business leader Eileen O’Mara as the company’s EMEA revenue and growth lead. O’Mara previously served as SVP and CMO of Salesforce’s international business and held leadership roles in EMEA for both Salesforce and Oracle.

The company said that its geographic expansion is an indicator of strong growth. In a statement, Stripe said it has more than 2,000 employees serving more than 1m users globally.

“The company continues to broaden its product and payment methods portfolio and is hiring new senior leaders. Stripe helps millions of businesses process billions of euros every year,” a spokesperson for the company said.

Kelly Earley was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com