This week Stripe, the digital payments company, raised $600m at a $95bn valuation. That officially makes Stripe Silicon Valley's most valuable startup, and puts it second only to Bytedance — the Chinese parent company of TikTok — in the competition for the world's most valuable.
Stripe's revaluation this week also underlines just how dominant the US remains in the venture and startup landscape — 51 of the 100 most valuable startups globally are American. 22 are Chinese, 9 are British, 7 are Indian and the rest are spread out thinly between a handful of countries.
Happy St. Paddy's Day
For the Irish Collison brothers, who founded Stripe when they were just 19 and 21, the fresh financing will help Stripe to expand into Europe from its base in Ireland, where one of its two headquarters is located (the other is in San Francisco).
John, the younger of the 2 brothers, recently noted that "Stripe itself is now bigger [by payment volumes] than the entire ecommerce market was when we started working on Stripe". So happy St. Patrick's Day John & Patrick Collison — thanks for making everyone feel bad about what we were doing when we were 19-21.
The full list of the most valuable startups can be found at CB Insights.
