Stripe Expands European Presence

San Francisco-based Payments startup Stripe is rolling out its services in eight new European countries, the company said in a press release on Monday (Sept. 9).

Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia can now start accepting payments in over 130 currencies from anywhere in the world.

“Central and Eastern Europe have a lot of entrepreneurial and technological talent, and we believe even more of its companies could be expanding globally,” says Felix Huber, head of Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa at Stripe. “Stripe aims to empower more companies from this region to export their creativity and ambition to the rest of the world.”

Companies can also use the Stripe platform to handle accounting, billing, third-party payouts and mobile payments from a centralized dashboard. Mobile wallets Apple Pay and Google Pay can also be accessed by Stripe users.

Stripe taps into machine learning for enhanced security safeguards to help prevent fraudulent transactions.  

The company also announced Thursday (Sept. 5) the launch of Stripe Capital to simplify the way internet companies can access funds.

It remains difficult for online businesses to get access to capital. Even those companies that can get loans spend hours and hours on paperwork only to wait weeks and sometimes months to get the money.

“Stripe Capital makes it easy for internet businesses to get the funds they need when they need them,” said Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s chief product officer. “It’s important to think about financial inclusion not just in terms of consumers, but also in terms of businesses. Businesses, especially small businesses and startups, are the engines for job creation in our economy. It should be trivially simple and lightning-fast for them to access the capital they need to smooth their cash flow and invest in their own growth.”

In June, Stripe announced Stripe Terminal, a set of SDKs, APIs and pre-certified card readers that let users accept in-person payments. It’s now available all over the United States.