This week, payments startup Stripe closed a $70 million round of financing, rocketing the company’s valuation to a hefty $3.5 billion, almost double that of its last raise.
Thrive Capital, a NY-based VC firm led by Josh Kushner, led the round, writing a $30 million check to get into the payments space.
This is far and away the largest single investment Thrive Capital has ever made, but it isn’t the first notable one. Thrive Capital joined Sequoia and Greylock in a $50 million round for Instagram. Forbes later wrote that Thrive doubled its money after Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion.
Thrive Capital, which has been around since 2009, has to date raised $400 million to invest in portfolio companies. Its last fund was $200 million — which gives you some context of how significant the Stripe investment is for the company. But the big bet on payments makes sense.
Predicting what people will buy is much harder than predicting that they will buy something. And this is one reason why Stripe is an attractive investment.
In September, Stripe announced that it had surpassed 1,000 different apps using the Stripe payments APIs, with notable partners like Twitter joining the platform. We’ve also heard rumors that Facebook may come on board soon, too.
Thrive did not respond to request for interview.
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