Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe in 2010 to simplify online payments for internet businesses.
The Irish brothers had previously worked on entrepreneurial projects, including Auctomatic, which was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008. Stripe focused on providing developer-friendly tools and application programming interfaces that allowed companies to accept payments without building the entire payments infrastructure themselves.
Its products became especially attractive to startups because they could be integrated into websites and apps with relatively little engineering work. Stripe later expanded beyond basic card processing into billing, fraud prevention, issuing, tax and other financial services.
Stripe is sometimes confused with Block’s Square, another major payments company. Square was founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey and initially focused on card readers for small merchants. Stripe’s early identity was more closely associated with internet businesses and software developers.