Stripe expands in Europe, adding five more countries

Stripe, the €33bn online payments firm created by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison, is to roll its services out to another five European countries — Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta.

The expansion is being co-ordinated from by the company’s Dublin office, its largest international engineering hub with 320 people.

It comes just weeks after the firm raised an additional $600m (€552m) in venture funding, which now values the company at almost $36bn (€33bn).

“Stripe is in 39 countries now, 29 of which are in Europe,” said Matt Henderson, Stripe’s business lead for Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

“We are excited about bringing Stripe to even more European countries, making payment acceptance and money movement faster and less complicated for everyone. We are nearing our goal of making Stripe universally available to businesses across the continent.”

Stripe’s online services are aimed at getting businesses online quickly. The expansion will include availability of Stripe Connect for running multi-sided marketplaces, Billing for subscriptions and recurring payments, Radar for fraud detection and prevention and Sigma for analytics.

Stripe has recently expanded its services in the US to include a credit card (Stripe Card) and a small business lending service (Stripe Capital).

Co-founder John Collision recently said that the world’s current bout of social distancing has intensified an online transition that he says was already happening.

“People who never dreamt of using the internet to see the doctor or buy groceries are now doing so out of necessity,” he said.

“And businesses that deferred moving online or had no reason to operate online have made the leap practically overnight. We believe now is not the time to pull back, but to invest even more heavily in Stripe’s platform.”