How Stripe’s billing experiment propelled a $500 million AI-fueled business.
Jerry
In 2010, Patrick and John Collison were experimenting. The brothers were writing code and brainstorming product ideas before doubling down on payments in 2011—ultimately building a company now valued at $70 billion.
Stripe Billing, for years a slept-on prototype at the San Francisco company, has become the engine of Stripe’s Revenue and Finance Automation suite. At the end of January, the group crossed $500 million in annual revenue run rate. Though the Collison brothers wrote the first iteration of a billing product before Stripe launched, Stripe Billing didn’t come to market until 2018.
With customers like Atlassian, OpenAI, Anthropic, and AMC Networks, Stripe Billing essentially handles a company’s recurring payments and usage-based services like pay-as-you-go cloud-based software. (If you’ve paid for an AMC+ subscription to watch The Walking Dead, you’ve used Stripe Billing.) It’s a notably different market and technology than the bread-and-butter online payments Stripe processes. Stripe Billing’s rise means the company has new competitors in a fundamentally different business—and potential to embed even more deeply into large enterprises and fast-growing AI startups.
Source: FORTUNE
