Stripe

Stripe was founded in 2010 by brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison, who grew up in Ireland. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Stripe remains privately held and has been widely reported in the financial press as one of the largest private fintech companies by valuation, though the company has not confirmed official figures. Precise global headcount has not been publicly disclosed.

The core product is an API-first online payments platform that enables businesses and developers to accept credit card and other payments within websites and applications.

Stripe provides payment-processing APIs that allow companies — ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprises — to integrate payment acceptance into their products. The primary business model is transaction-fee-based (pay-per-transaction). The platform was built developer-first, with extensive documentation and SDKs across many languages, but Stripe has expanded its addressable buyer to include finance teams and product managers as well.

Stripe Payments handles credit card processing, refund management, and fraud prevention. Stripe Billing adds subscription and recurring-revenue management. Stripe Connect is designed for marketplaces and platforms that need to split payments among multiple sellers. Stripe Atlas offers a service to help global startups incorporate a US company. Stripe Radar is a machine-learning-based fraud prevention tool. Stripe Treasury enables businesses to offer embedded banking services to their own customers.

Stripe's main direct competitors include Adyen, Braintree (owned by PayPal), and Square (Block). Adyen focuses more on large enterprise clients and in-person point-of-sale payments, while Stripe was built with an emphasis on developer experience and digital-native markets. Stripe operates in dozens of countries and supports a wide range of currencies, which has made it a common choice among SaaS companies and e-commerce platforms.

No verified public information is available confirming Stripe offices or a local headcount in Israel. Stripe does support Israeli businesses as merchants on its platform.