No sign of the Collison brothers cashing in yet, as State bets on the success of €80bn Stripe
John and Patrick Collison, from Limerick, founders of Stripe.
Ireland's young Collison brothers had already made Stripe the Silicon Valley sensation as the internet payments company they created thrived out of its San Francisco base.
The news this weekend only confirmed that Stripe had vaulted to become Silicon Valley's most valuable private startup, with investors vying to inject a further $600m that valued the firm at a remarkable $95bn (€80bn).
For Stripe, it is a highly significant mark to have reached. It means that some of the world's biggest billionaires and largest funds, including early investors Elon Musk of Tesla electric car fame and Peter Thiel, are confident that Stripe can take on the rest of the internet payments world.
It also signals that the Limerick-Tipperary brothers, John, still only 30, and Patrick, 32, will not be cashing in on an estimated personal wealth of well over $3bn for quite some time.
All the signs are there that the brothers have the ambition to grow and grow again as a private company and will eschew unlocking their wealth by selling shares on stock markets, such is the phenomenal growth they predict as they turn their focus beyond the US and back into Europe.
Part of the European growth strategy unfolded a few weeks ago, when former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, the Canadian who has an Irish passport, joined the Stripe board, just as the latest finding round was drawing to a close.
No less significant, the funding also marked something of a homecoming for Stripe and the Collison brothers.
They have committed to creating a further 1,000 jobs in Ireland over the coming years.
It is a pledge that will add to the 300 people they already employ at a key European head office Stripe runs out of Dublin.
And cementing the relationship, the Irish State is also betting on their continued success.
The State through the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) injected $50m, or about a tenth of the latest funding round.
Albeit a minnow, Isif is the first sovereign wealth fund to invest in Stripe.
Isif was formally fashioned seven years ago from the remnants of the old Penson Reserve Fund which was raided under the international troika to help finance the Irish bailout.
It invests in companies in a number of ways, through other funds or directly into companies, which means that its $50m slice of Stripe will sit alongside other direct investments in food firm Green Isle-Donegal Catch and in Shannon Airport's runway.
League tables of the richest private and public companies are a part of the way markets value corporate success. At over $2 trillion, Saudi oil producer Aramco and Apple vie with each other as the world's most valuable firms.
However, the success of an oil giant, or of Apple in building the iPhone, is more easily understood than Stripe's success in building a global payments company because the internet should be populated with hundreds of competitors by now, even as PayPal has done something similar for years.
Although accelerating Stripe's expansion, the explosion of online commerce during the global Covid pandemic provides only part of the explanation.
And the most fascinating insight into the brothers' success comes from what some tech observers have long said: What Stripe does is "super boring", a challenge that only tech nerds would relish.
Stripe getting involved in online payments in any part of Europe, it first must get into the weeds of banking in each country.
The brothers, from Tipperary and schooled in Limerick, have deliberately fashioned a reputation of nerds, even though the image doesn't last for long on their occasional TV appearances, including on the Late Late Show.
For now, the brothers appear to want to keep a low-profile, even as they bid to add many more billions to their Stripe creation, an ambition that may also serve Ireland well.
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