Stripe users processed almost €600bn in payments last year

Significant growth was a result of the impact of the pandemic and the huge switch to online sales

Patrick and John Collison the co-founders of Stripe said the payments giant added 1,400 new companies every day last year. 

Businesses that use Stripe's payment services processed more than $640bn (€589bn) in payments last year, a 60% increase on 2020.

In their annual letter to Stripe users, Limerick brothers John and Patrick Collison said the payments came from a rapidly growing group of businesses and that the payments giant added 1,400 new companies every day last year. 

More than 100 businesses also passed $1m (€920k) in lifetime sales through Stripe.

The brothers put the significant growth down to the impact of the pandemic and the huge switch to online sales and said the 2021 growth figures would not be repeated this year.

Despite the growth in e-commerce the Collisons said the internet economy is still in its early days and online spending was only 12% of global spend. 

"Stripe’s mission is to grow the GDP of the internet," the letter states.

"That means both helping existing economic activity migrate to the internet and enabling completely new undertakings that couldn’t exist in an offline world."

Growing the internet economy

Stripe said it wants to grow the internet economy further by increasing the rate of new business creation, helping established firms to adapt their business models to online, increasing cross-border commerce, and lowering the cost of scaling a business.

Stripe is headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin. 

Along with web payment processing, the firm offers a range of services to companies including invoicing, billing, tax calculation, and identity verification. 

The company itself is the most valuable startup in the world; its most recent fundraising placed its overall value at $95bn (€87.4bn).

Last year the collisions announced plans to hire 1,000 people in Dublin over the next five years

In their letter to Stripe users they said much of the company's recent growth has been outside the US

"Back home, 85 European companies passed the milestone of a $1bn (€920m) valuation in 2021, registering a unicorn growth rate that’s more than twice that of the US," the Collisons said.

"We expect that a very large fraction of the important tech companies of the next decade will be built outside of the traditional US tech hubs."