Amazon has quietly partnered with Stripe, allowing it to process a “large, though undisclosed, portion” of the e-commerce giant’s transactions, according to Bloomberg Businessweek’s Ashlee Vance.
The deal is a big win for Stripe, whose meteoric rise has been driven largely by providing payment processing technology to startups. Stripe launched in 2010, attracting companies like Lyft and DoorDash by providing a simple way for startups to accept payments by adding just a few lines of code to their products.
Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison grew up in rural Ireland, moved to the U.S. to attend MIT and Harvard, respectively, and launched the startup in Silicon Valley across the street from PayPal, Bloomberg reports. Stripe has since grown to 750 employees, with a valuation of $9.2 billion.
But despite Stripe’s early success, the Amazon partnership is still a big step forward for the company.
Here’s how Vance characterizes the deal:
Stripe continues to attract startups. It intends to be behind the next Uber or Airbnb, to cash in on its meteoric growth. ‘If you think about the broad trajectory of the internet, most of the breakout successes are still to come,’ Patrick says. But Stripe is also trying to make deals with Target Corp., Under Armour Inc., and other merchants to snag money available outside the startup scene, partnerships made more possible by the trust Amazon is showing.
Read Vance’s full profile of the Collison brothers, titled “How Two Brothers Turned Seven Lines of Code Into a $9.2 Billion Startup,” here.
