Visa has made a big bet on Silicon Valley payments upstart Stripe.
Tomorrow, the financial services giant will announce that it has made an investment in Stripe.
Founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe helps businesses accept nearly all forms of digital payments online. Its service has gained considerable traction and helped push the company into the top tier of startups known as unicorns that are valued at $1 billion or more.
With the latest funding with Visa ?V 0.91% , Stripe is valued at $5 billion, up from $3.5 billion just seven months earlier, according to Collison. The amount of investment, which will be used to expand internationally and for hiring, was undisclosed.
Stripe has taken in over $300 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, AmEx, and General Catalyst among others. Both Sequoia and American Express added to their investments in the latest round while Kleiner Perkins put in money for the first time.
?I think the valuation jumped because of the surprising momentum of the business,? explained Patrick Collison, who is the CEO of the company. ?Right now, we are ahead of our 2015 projections of revenue, and transaction volume from merchants.?
Increasingly, Stripe has partnered with large companies to help process their payments. In early July, Stripe announced a deal with American Express to let merchants accept payments on their sites through the credit card company?s new PayPal ?PYPL 2.64% ?rival. Last year, Stripe inked a deal with Ant Financial?s Alipay, China?s largest digital wallet, so that online retailers can accept payments from shoppers in China.
Additionally, Apple ?AAPL 0.41% ?listed Stripe as a preferred partner on its payments service, Apple Pay. Stripe also powers payments made through Buy buttons for Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.
?Partly through design and partly through circumstance, Stripe has a spectacular market opportunity at its doorstep,? Moritz said in an interview with Fortune. ?Stripe is at the triple intersection of mobile payments, cross border commerce, outsourcing payments for medium and large companies.?
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