Stripe is an online payments platform which allows both private individuals and businesses to accept payments over the Internet. Stripe focuses on providing the technical, fraud prevention, and banking infrastructure required to operate online payment systems. The company has set itself the mission of "increasing the GDP of the internet."

Irish founders John and Patrick Collison founded Stripe in 2010 as Y Combinator alumni. Stripe began as a startup called /dev/payments but was later renamed Stripe and it was launched in September 2011. According to the founders, they had experienced first-hand the difficulty of accepting online payments.

On almost every front, it was becoming easier to build and launch an online business. Payments, however, remained dominated by clunky legacy players. It seemed clear that there should be a developer-focused, instant-setup payment platform that would scale to any size.

The somewhat longwinded patent is titled 'Method for Conducting a Transaction between a Merchant Site and a Customers Electronic Device without exposing Payment Information to a Server-Side Application of the Merchant Site". It was filed on the 31st of October, 2012.

Stripe is now 576 people and headquartered in San Francisco. The company has received around $300 million in funding to date from investors include Sequoia Capital, Visa, American Express, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. At the end of 2016, the company was valued at nearly $10B. Quite an achievement for a company that has only been around for a few years! 

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