Stripe

Stripe is a company from the USA that processes payments on the internet. When you enter your card number in an online shop, that payment technically has to reach the bank. Stripe provides exactly this pathway for the merchant. To do so, the shop operator integrates a ready-made piece of software instead of programming the connection to banks and card providers themselves. Stripe charges a small fee per payment for this, in Europe typically about 1.5 percent of the amount plus a few cents. The company was founded in 2010 by the Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison and is today among the most valuable non-publicly-traded companies in the world.

Why almost every start-up begins with it

Before Stripe, accepting card payments was cumbersome for small companies. You needed a contract with a bank, checks, and often weeks of lead time. Stripe has shortened this process to a few lines of code and a sign-up in the browser. This means a two-person team can start collecting money on the same day as a large corporation.

That is why Stripe has become the standard infrastructure for new internet companies. A great many AI providers process their subscriptions through it, including OpenAI and Anthropic. When an industry grows quickly, Stripe grows along with it, because it earns a share of every payment. This makes the company an indirect gauge of the AI boom.

For investors, Stripe is also interesting because it is not traded on the stock exchange. Its value is determined by funding rounds, in which investors buy new shares. In 2025, the company was valued at around 100 billion dollars in this way. An IPO has been expected for years but has not taken place.

The journey of a payment through Stripe

Stripe works like a translator between the shop and the financial world. The shop sends a request to Stripe: this customer should pay 30 euros. Stripe forwards the request via the card networks such as Visa or Mastercard to the customer’s bank. The bank responds with yes or no, and Stripe returns the result to the shop. The whole process usually takes less than a second.

The interface for this is called an API, that is, a defined language in which two programs talk to each other. Developers value Stripe primarily for this cleanly documented interface. It’s also important that the card data never ends up on the shop’s server. The customer types it into an input field that comes directly from Stripe, which relieves the merchant of strict data-protection obligations.

A common misconception: Stripe is not a bank. The money sits with partner banks, and Stripe only organizes the process and the payout to the merchant, usually after two to seven days. In addition, machine learning models check every payment for fraud. They compare patterns such as device, location, and purchase history with billions of past payments and block suspicious ones.

Where you’ll notice the name in everyday life

Next time you make an online purchase, look at the payment page. If it says 'powered by Stripe' in small print, or if an addition with this name appears on your bank statement, the payment went through the service. Many newsletter subscriptions, donation platforms, and app payment features also use it. Similar providers are PayPal, Adyen from the Netherlands, and Klarna from Sweden.

In business news, Stripe mainly comes up in three contexts. First, regarding the question of an IPO, second, regarding figures on the growth of online commerce, and third, regarding AI topics. That’s because Stripe now also sells tools that let companies bill for the use of AI services per request. Such usage-based pricing models are computationally complex and therefore a business of their own.