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Currently valued at over 36 billion dollars and still privately held, Stripe is an American financial software service platform providing payment solutions that can be licensed across e-commerce platforms and other mobile applications. The company has become a leader in its market and in spite of its huge market cap is still very much run as a start-up. Since beginning under Peter Thiel’s Y Combinator incubator programme in 2010, it has grown into the start-up that invests in smaller start-ups in other geographic locations from North America as part of its growth strategy. In acquiring Paystack, Stripe is doubling down on its previous investment in the Nigerian start-up in 2018 when it led a funding round of $8million. Other investors at the time, Chinese conglomerate, Tencent and financial services giant, Visa. As we know, Visa already has a foothold in Nigeria having acquired Interswitch earlier this year.
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Paystack has grown exponentially and said to service over 60,000 customers including traditional banks and other financial service players in Nigeria. The position of the start-up in Nigeria’s budding tech scene means that this is coming at a very great time for the tech community that has now taken the lead in the civil society space thanks to #EndSARS. Founded by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi in 2015, the start-up has been a shining beacon for other tech outfits and the exit does a lot for the confidence of tech practitioners in an especially difficult time in the political and economic life of Nigeria. One would be remiss not to construe this as a win for Nigeria’s Gen X. Featured Image Source: Tech Startups
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