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…