Stripe handled more than $640 billion in payments in 2021 — an increase of 60% over the prior year — the two brothers who founded the company noted in an open letter Thursday (April 14) addressed to the “Stripe community.”
But John and Patrick Collison cautioned, “Since a lot of this came from one-time behavioral adjustments caused by the pandemic, 2022 won’t match the same level of growth.”
The privately held company, co-based in San Francisco and Dublin, Ireland, does not release financial statements publicly. As a result, the annual letter provides much of what the public learns of Stripe’s performance.
The brothers stated in the letter that the growth was due in part to the average daily addition of 1,400 companies and nonprofits as customers. Throughout 2021, an average of more than 100 Stripe clients a day surpassed the $1 million in lifetime Stripe-processed sales mark. Stripe stated it is working with “more than 50” companies, which process more than $1 billion in payments through Stripe.
The Collison brothers listed several product highlights for the year. The company created Payment Links “because it became clear that even the small amount of code involved in setting up Stripe can be an impediment in the early days.” It also created Stripe Tax because “we heard how much hassle is entailed in sales tax and VAT.” Stripe acquired sales tax-filing-manager TaxJar in connection with launching Stripe Tax, which is “one of our fastest-growing products.”
Stripe Invoicing, which is several years old, was expanded globally. And the company bought Bangalore, India-based Recko to help automate revenue recognition, which the letter stated “is always tricky at scale.”
The company’s “biggest structural investment” of late has been in FinTech, according to the letter.
“We’re making heavy investments in Stripe Treasury (easy money management, powering products like Shopify Balance) and Stripe Issuing (programmatic card issuance for companies like TripActions),” the letter stated.
Most of the companies that joined Stripe last year were headquartered outside the United States, according to the letter. Also, the number of companies in Latin America using Stripe grew 518% and the number in the Asia-Pacific region grew 106%.
“We expect that a very large fraction of the important tech companies of the next decade will be built outside of the traditional U.S. tech hubs,” the letter stated.
Stripe has grown to employ more than 7,000 people in 23 countries, according to the letter.
We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with innovators and disruptors.
Learn More