(Bloomberg) — John and Patrick Collison sold their first company for $5 million when they were still teenagers. A decade or so later, the second business they founded is now worth $95 billion, making it the most valuable U.S. startup.
The latest valuation for Stripe Inc., their online payments processing firm, gives John, 30, and Patrick, 32, a net worth of about $11.5 billion each, putting the two brothers among the richest self-made millennial billionaires in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The valuation figure is at the top of the range Bloomberg News reported in November, when Stripe was in talks with investors. At the time, discussions were for a value of more than $70 billion with the possibility of pushing it as high as $100 billion.
Its current valuation puts it ahead of billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Instacart Inc., according to CBInsights data, and surpasses the market value of publicly traded rivals including Adyen NV, Global Payments Inc. and Fiserv Inc.
The Irish brothers founded Stripe in 2010 after dropping out of college in the U.S. They were previously worth $4.3 billion, according to the wealth index.
Snap Inc. founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, as well as China’s Wang Ning are the only other self-made billionaires under the age of 35 among the world’s 500 richest, while U.K. aristocrat Hugh Grosvenor and Walmart Inc. heir Lukas Walton hold the sole inherited fortunes in the group.
Stripe, which sells software allowing businesses to accept online payments, has been a beneficiary of the e-commerce boom accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. The company plans to invest in its European operations, in particular its headquarters in Dublin, to support surging demand and expand its global payments and treasury network, the company said Sunday in a statement.
The firm also has a headquarters in San Francisco, according to its website, and counts Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research and Sequoia Capital among its investors.
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