The digital payments world got big news yesterday when Visa announced its investment in the San Francisco-based Stripe – a four-year-old company that provides application programming interfaces that help businesses create customizable mobile and online payment systems to accept payments from around the world in more than 100 currencies and Bitcoin.
The move creates a partnership that offers developers access to Visa's network and payment technologies and expands Stripe's reach in emerging markets.
"Working together, the companies will enable a global payments solution for new ecommerce experiences like 'buy buttons' and new innovations to come," Visa said in its announcement. "Stripe will also be one of the first beta partners to connect to Visa's network capabilities via APIs and SDKs, offering their developer community access to payment and risk management services, Visa's tokenization service and security technologies."
"Given the explosive growth of new commerce experiences enabled by a global developer community, Visa is expanding its strategic relationships across the payments ecosystem," Visa Innovation and Strategic Partnerships Executive Vice President Jim McCarthy said. "We are very excited to work with Stripe and leverage our combined assets to broaden our offering to new types of merchants and developers globally."
Launched in September 2011 and founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe has about 270 employees and nine global offices. It said it has raised $200 million in funding. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk. The company powers businesses in 20 countries; in addition, Twitter, Pinterest, Lyft, TaskRabbit, SurveyMonkey, Kickstarter, Salesforce and several other popular tech names use the company's technology, it said.
This latest announcement comes after Visa's May 28 launch of its new Digital Enablement Program, which is designed to simplify access to Visa's secure token technology by, among other things, allowing financial institutions and tech companies to bypass setting up individual contractual agreements and technology integrations among themselves. Google's Android Pay is a partner in that program.
The Visa deal also marks Stripe's second partnership with major card companies. On July 9, American Express also announced a partnership with Stripe. That deal will allow merchants using Stripe as a payments platform to enable American Express Checkout for their customers.
Stripe is now valued at $5 billion, according to some reports. The amount of Visa's investment was not disclosed.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
