Stripe Raises Money to Expand Globally

Stripe has raised $80 million in a new round of funding and is reportedly working on a payments deal with Twitter.

The new round of funding was led by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who is a long-time backer of Stripe, a company that provides technology to other companies to build payments applications.

"Processing billions of dollars a year for some of the most successful companies and marketplaces on the Internet, Stripe plans to use the funding to build an increasingly robust infrastructure for payments and expand Stripe internationally," says Kelly Sims, a Stripe spokesperson, in a Jan. 23 email to PaymentsSource.

Stripe is available in the U.K., Canada and Ireland. It is testing its technology in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Spain. The company recently partnered with Ecwid, a company that sells technology to power online stores.

"Stripe aims to expand Internet commerce by making it easy to process transactions and manage an online business. We want to increase the GDP of the internet," Sims says.

Stripe is also nearing a deal with Twitter, according to the tech news site Recode. Sims did not answer questions about a possible Twitter relationship. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

Thiel has also invested in Clinkle, a payments startup that's developing a system to process transactions without hardware or cards.