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Stripe raises $70M at $3.5B valuation, double that of January

ft.com

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Re: Stripe raises $70M at $3.5B valuation, double that of January

#6
post #5

Any idea what they plan on using this money for? Having just raised $80M in January what could they need another $70M for?

The article states:

"The company is still sitting on much of what it raised in January, but it wanted to "err on the side of being really well-capitalised" in case markets cool down, Mr Collison said."

Re: Stripe raises $70M at $3.5B valuation, double that of January

#7
post #6
post #5

Any idea what they plan on using this money for? Having just raised $80M in January what could they need another $70M for?

The article states: "The company is still sitting on much of what it raised in January, but it wanted to "err on the side of being really well-capitalised" in case markets cool down, Mr Collison said."

Does that mean they believe we are in a bubble? They have lots of data from the transactions, so they should perhaps be able to see if the markets begin to change?

Re: Stripe raises $70M at $3.5B valuation, double that of January

#9
Please don't submit articles which are behind paywalls. Usually ft.com, wsj.com can be accessed freely by using Google Webcache. Here is the link to the cached article :

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3i5Cv6t...

Edit : You can use cachedpages.com to get links to Google Webcache et al.

Re: Stripe raises $70M at $3.5B valuation, double that of January

#10
post #5

Any idea what they plan on using this money for? Having just raised $80M in January what could they need another $70M for?

Since we don't know, we can speculate.

One, they are expecting that it will become difficult to raise money in the future and they are not yet profitable.

That implies they do not see an IPO in their future.

Two, they have been doing this a long time and some of their early investors/execs want a bit of liquidity, and since they haven't (or can't) offer shares to the public, they are using a private markets to provide that liquidity.

Three, they are planning an IPO and some banker convinced them to do "one more round" in order to fill their coffers with some stock outside the stock they could buy as part of the deal to bring them to market. This is a hedge against a 'soft' IPO like Facebook's where the IPO shares available to the bankers were not able to be sold at a profit given the lack of a 'bump.' The hedge would work by them using that stock to sell into the IPO (at say $5B valuation) and thus 'lock in' their payoff without relying on the stock going up at all at the IPO.

Take your pick.

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