Stripe

Stripe provides financial infrastructure for online and in-person payments, positioning itself as the foundation on which businesses can accept payments, offer financial services, and build their own revenue models instead of building every component themselves.

The platform supports more than 135 currencies and payment methods with 99.999% historical uptime. Beyond core payment processing, Stripe covers subscription management with Billing (more than 200 million active subscriptions run on it), in-person payments with Terminal, marketplace payment handling with Connect, and virtual and physical card issuance with Issuing. Radar handles fraud detection, complemented by identity verification and tax compliance tools.

With the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), Stripe is also positioning itself in the emerging field of AI-driven shopping: businesses can use it to accept purchases directly from AI platforms without major technical changes. Billing is transaction-based, with transparent, consistent fees and no hidden costs.

Stripe was founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison in Palo Alto, who dropped out of MIT and Harvard respectively to build it. The company processed $1.9 trillion in payment volume in 2025, according to its own figures, and is used by half of the Fortune 100.

As early as 2011, shortly after founding, investors including Elon Musk and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel backed Stripe — an early vote of confidence that helped the company establish itself against incumbent payment providers.