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In Silicon Valley, the rich keep getting richer.
Stripe, the online payments company, is in talks to raise new investment dollars at around a $5 billion valuation, according to multiple sources familiar with the deal. The exact amount of the investment could not be learned. The talks come less than seven months after the San Francisco-based company announced a $70 million investment that valued it at $3.5 billion. Stripe has raised $190 million in total in previous financing rounds.
A Stripe spokeswoman declined to comment.
The deal discussions underscore the current willingness among tech investors to pour huge sums of money into the hottest tech startups in quicker succession than at any point in the last few years. Startups such as Slack, Instacart and Yik Yak are among 20 private companies that have raised three rounds of financing apiece in the last 18 months, according to research firm CB Insights. Then there’s Uber, which is in talks to raise its third gargantuan investment in less than a year.
Stripe, run by 20-something brothers Patrick and John Collison, makes software that startups and other companies use to accept online payments on websites and apps. Stripe typically charges businesses 2.9 percent, plus a 30-cent fee, on each transaction, though larger businesses are often able to negotiate lower rates. Stripe is known in the software developer community for its ease of setup.
Payments companies like Stripe typically pass along at least half of their cut of each transaction to payment card networks and other financial institutions. But the more aggregate sales that Stripe’s customers run through the Stripe platform, the better deals Stripe gets from these financial institutions. That means Stripe, and competitors like Braintree, are in a race to secure customers and partners in what some in the payments industry would refer to as a “volume game.” PayPal bought Braintree in 2013 for $800 million.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
