Stripe launches Sigma to help e-commerce players analyse revenue

2 Jun 2017

Image: Indypendenz/Shutterstock

Stripe launches Sigma to help entrepreneurs and online businesses make better sense of their data and recover lost revenue.

The Collison brothers’ $9bn e-commerce juggernaut Stripe has revealed Sigma, a new tool to help start-ups analyse revenue and focus on product.

Sigma is a data analytics platform designed specifically for technology companies.

‘Good data analytics should be like a good email system: fast to get, easy to use and readily available to anyone in the company’
– JOHN COLLISON

Sigma is an SQL query tool that allows people to quickly analyse and make business decisions on their most important information, including financial, payments and order data.

The software is fully integrated into users’ Stripe accounts and requires no set-up work.

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Stripe launches Sigma to help online businesses analyse revenue

John Collison at a previous Web Summit in Dublin. Image: Web Summit

Sigma is optimised for small and midsize companies that haven’t yet invested the significant engineering time required to build their own custom data analytics tooling.

For example, Harri, a hospitality talent company, used Sigma to identify unpaid invoices, leading to tens of thousands of dollars in recovered revenue in just five minutes.

As well as an initial free trial, Sigma will be available to all Stripe users globally. It will be a paid product with a monthly fee, based on the size of a user’s business.

This follows news that Stripe is also launching a new service that will enable online marketplaces to bring sellers to its platform and provide multiple payment services.

“Good data analytics should be like a good email system: fast to get, easy to use and readily available to anyone in the company,” said John Collison, president and co-founder of Stripe.

“This is particularly true for revenue and financial information, which can inform a lot of strategic decisions.

“With Sigma, we’re giving businesses a zero-set-up tool that can be customised for any number of purposes.

“Whether you work in finance, analytics, customer support or product management, Sigma gives you an easy way to make sense out of your data,” he explained.

The Stripe e-commerce engine has been going from strength to strength since it was founded in San Francisco seven years ago, and, last November, the company was valued at $9bn following a $150m funding round led by CapitalG and General Catalyst.

When they were teenagers living in Limerick, the Collison brothers began a start-up called Shuppa in 2007, which later became known as Auctomatic. It was acquired by Canadian firm Live Current Media for $5m when the brothers were just 19 and 17, respectively.

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

editorial@siliconrepublic.com