Stripe is an Irish-American financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company. It sells payment processing software and application programming interfaces (APIs) for websites and mobile apps. Stripe is headquartered in South San Francisco, California, and in Dublin, Ireland.
History of Stripe
Creator: John Collison and Patrick Collison. Year: 2010.
Brothers John Collison and Patrick Collison founded Stripe in 2010 in Palo Alto, California. They are Irish. Patrick Collison is the chief executive. In 2011 Stripe got a US$2 million investment. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Liam Casey contributed. Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel also contributed. In March 2013 Stripe made its first purchase. Kickoff was a chat and task-management app.
In 2012 Stripe moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco. In October 2019 it said it would move to the Oyster Point area of South San Francisco. The move was set for 2021. In February 2021 Mark Carney joined the board. He was a former governor of the Bank of Canada. He was also a former governor of the Bank of England. He left the board in 2025. He left to run for leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. In October 2021 Stripe bought Recko. Recko is an accounting platform. In January 2022 Stripe signed a five-year deal with Ford Motor Company. The deal handles consumer vehicle orders. It also handles reservations.
Wikipedia lists these products. They are payments, billing, Connect, Sigma, Atlas, Radar, Issuing, Terminal and Tax. In 2024 Stripe reported revenue of US$5.1 billion. In 2025 it processed more than US$1.9 trillion in payment volume. The volume came from 5 million businesses. It had about 8,500 employees. Its value was about US$159 billion in 2025. Stripe also owns OpenRouter. Wikipedia lists it as a subsidiary.
Changelog and latest update
In April 2022 Stripe said it had a deal with ION. ION is a UK financial technology company. In July 2022 the Wall Street Journal reported a fall in the internal share price. It said the implied valuation dropped from US$95 billion to US$74 billion. In November 2022 Stripe laid off about 14% of its workforce. In March 2023 Stripe announced that OpenAI chose Stripe to power payments for ChatGPT Plus and DALL-E. Stripe also adopted OpenAI's GPT-4 model for its developer tools.
In January 2025 Stripe sent layoff notices. They went to nearly 300 workers. Most were in product, operations and engineering. Stripe's API changelog records every API version. It records every change too. Stripe uses dated API versions. A developer can pin an integration to one version. Each change is listed in release order. The newest comes first. Developers read it before moving to a newer version.
Latest update: API version 2026-09-30.endive, 2026-09-30
The Stripe API changelog lists version 2026-09-30.endive as the newest. The first change under it unifies the billing cycle anchor format. It applies to Subscriptions and Invoices. The changelog files that change under Billing and invoicing. It marks the change as breaking. The changelog lists no separate date for each change, so the version date applies to all of them.
Usage examples
Stripe uses a secret API key for server requests and a publishable key for browser code. The secret key starts with sk_ and must stay on the server. Each request goes to the api.stripe.com host over HTTPS, and the request body uses form fields or JSON. A Payment Link is a hosted page that a site can share with a visitor. The examples use placeholder values such as YOUR_API_KEY and price_PLACEHOLDER. Replace each placeholder with a value from your own Stripe dashboard before use. Test with test-mode keys before any live payment.
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/payment_links \
-u YOUR_API_KEY: \
-d "line_items[0][price]"=price_PLACEHOLDER \
-d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1Creates a hosted Payment Link for one price with a quantity of 1. The -u option sends the API key as the user name with an empty password. The reply holds a url field, and the site can link to that address for a visitor to pay.
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/balance \
-u YOUR_API_KEY:Requests the current balance of the account. The reply lists the available and pending amounts for each currency. Use a test-mode key for this check, because a live key returns real account figures to the caller.
<script
src="https://js.stripe.com/v3/">
</script>Loads the Stripe.js library from Stripe. The library collects card details inside Stripe-hosted fields, so card numbers do not pass through the site server. The page then creates a Stripe object with the publishable key to confirm a payment.
stripe listen \
--forward-to localhost:4242/webhookUses the Stripe command-line tool to forward test events to a local web server on port 4242. A webhook is an HTTP request that Stripe sends to a site when an event occurs, such as a completed payment. The listener prints a signing secret for the endpoint.
References
These sources are outside Websnoogie and were checked on 2026-10-12.
Stripe, Inc. - Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia article on Stripe. It covers the founders, the 2010 start in Palo Alto, the move to South San Francisco, the 2022 valuation fall, the 2022 layoffs and the 2025 layoffs, with cited sources for each date. The article also notes the disputed founding year.
Stripe API changelog
Stripe
Official Stripe changelog for the API. It lists each dated API version, starting with the newest version at the top, and each breaking or additive change within it. Developers use it to plan upgrades. Each version has its own date in the version name, so a team can match a change to the day it shipped.
Stripe Payment Links
Stripe
Official Stripe guide to Payment Links. It explains how to create a hosted payment page and share its link with buyers.
Stripe webhooks
Stripe
Official Stripe guide to webhooks. It covers how Stripe sends event messages to an endpoint on a site, so that the site can record payments. Stripe lists the event types, so a developer can choose which events the site handles.
Stripe newsroom
Stripe
Official Stripe newsroom for company announcements, partnerships and product news. Use it to find the dates of Stripe announcements and to compare them with the Wikipedia history. The newsroom also lists partnerships and product launches that do not appear in the encyclopedia article.
A payment step that breaks at launch
Payment steps are often left until the end, and that is when a page breaks. A button may not open, or a price may show the wrong amount. Your visitors cannot tell you why a step failed, so we look for the cause first. The shopper then leaves, and the sale is gone.
We build the pages first. Words, prices, photos and contact details come before any payment step. After that, we connect the Stripe button, run a test order and check the result on a phone. We also check the confirmation page that the shopper sees after paying.
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Phone 402-813-4034 daily, 7 am to 10 pm, and ask us to check your payment step. We will show you what we found and what we changed. Or use the button below to start.
