Stripe has been aggressively investing in startups — 22 and growing

Stripe is in the spotlight as they ranked high based on several criteria in the latest Forrester Wave report (along with the European Adyen). They are also in talks to raise additional funding at nearly double the current valuation (current $36Billion, expected $70billion). Stripe raised $600million recently (Apri 2020) and if a fresh round materializes at the talked about valuation level of $70billion, they would be the world’s second-most valuable venture-backed company. If ByteDance divests its majority stake in TikTok by this Friday’s CFIUS deadline, then Stripe would become number one at $70billion.

The Forrester rankings are based on 15 criteria and 5 is the top score. The criteria include the offerings of card payments or alternative online payments, subscription & recurring payment capabilities, currency mgt & settlement, fraud detection, APIs & architecture, 3rd party integration, and more.

Most of the other competitors are already public companies (e.g. Paypal, Adyen, JP Morgan, ACI worldwide, etc), while Stripe seems to hold off.

I personally expected (still expect) that they will come to the public markets via one of the SPAC structures that are mushrooming left and right in the US. Bill Ackman has publicly said that he held preliminary talks with Stripe but nothing promising has come out of this.

Lots of Seeking Alpha authors discuss whether it makes sense at the $36billion valuation to trade the shares on EquityZen, the pre-IPO investment platform.

While all eyes are on Stripe`s services, valuation, and its investors; not many talk about Stripe`s VC activities that are significant. Stripe has always been committed to funding early-stage startups. Stripe Atlas, its service in collaboration with Silver Valley Bank is in alignment with the goal of empowering entrepreneurs to get started.

Stripe`s investment activity started picking up after 2017. Stripe has invested in several startups and in a significant number they have been the lead investor in the Seed, Series A round. Crunchbase reports 22 investments in total and 4 of them are diversity-focused. Fifteen out of the 22 investments were done after 2017. As early as 2014 they participated in the $3m funding of the…