Stripe raises $70 million to expand its digital payments service

Stripe, the digital payments company that helped drive Apple Pay’s early success, has raised $70 million in new funding, making it the 14th most valuable startup in the world. Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital led the round, which values Stripe at $3.5 billion. The company’s market cap is now about $1 billion more than that of popular cloud storage company Box, and is just shy of the valuations for Lending Club and Spotify, according to data from Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal.

E-commerce may not be the sexiest consumer technology. But for some start-ups, it is certainly where the money is. That is the case for Stripe, at least, an e-commerce start-up based in San Francisco, which announced on Tuesday that it had raised a new $70 million round in venture capital. The round, which includes Sequoia Capital and Thrive Capital, values Stripe at $3.5 billion, twice the amount the company was valued at less than one year ago. “There should be much more commerce happening online,” Patrick Collison, a founder of Stripe, said in an interview. “This 1990s ‘add to cart’ model we have today isn’t everything that commerce should be.” The company, which was founded by brothers, John and Patrick Collison, in 2009, offers payment processing services for small and medium-size businesses that want to sell items online. It competes with the likes of companies like PayPal, which has long dominated the online payments industry.