Earning their stripes

Stripe has soared past SpaceX and pushed past Instacart to become the most valuable startup in the country. Earlier in the month, the company announced a new $600 million round of funding that included investors like Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management, and Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency and puts Stripes current valuation at $95 billion. For those keeping track, the figure has nearly tripled since Stripe’s previous valuation of $36 billion last year.

With this most recent round of funding Stripe, which builds software that allows businesses to process payments online, has become the most valuable private company to come out of Silicon Valley–and it’s little wonder why. Thanks to the pandemic-spurred surge in online shopping, demand for mobile commerce has skyrocketed. The company’s high-profile customers include Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, Shopify, Uber, and Zoom, with at least 50 of these customers processing more than $1 billion on Stripe annually.

Stripe, which counts Square and PayPal among their competitors, said it will use this latest round of capital to invest in building more tools to help larger businesses handle payments, as well as to expand their presence in Europe. The company currently has headquarters in both San Francisco and Dublin.

Examining job data for Stripe, you can clearly see the company’s growth plans beginning to unfold. Average job listings remained below 100 from 2016 – 2019, and grew to 174 in 2020. Near the end of 2020 is when we begin to see a substantial spike, with listings growing 633% since Oct 8th.

Job growth is continuing its upward trajectory in 2021 as well, with an average of 677 listings so far this year. Following news of their current valuation, job listings hit 877 on March 22nd, 2021.

Stripe’s growth has made it one of the most widely anticipated initial public offering candidates of 2021, though it has yet to indicate whether they have plans to file. We will continue to monitor the company’s job listings to see what insight they might give us into the company’s growth strategy.

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