San Francisco, California-based innovative payment startup Stripe has just raised $245 million, valuing the company at $20 billion. Post this funding, the startup is now determined to expand to new markets globally and attract bigger customers.

Stripe will use the freshly raised funds to fuel growth in key overseas markets such as Southeast Asia and India, where it plans to tap into the growth of the e-commerce industry to expand its payments products. More than 500 million people in Southeast Asia and India are expected to become online customers in the next three years, Stripe said.

Within few hours after the fund raise announcement, Stripe has opened its fourth engineering hub in Singapore.

"In the years ahead, we plan to hire hundreds of people to help us expand our infrastructure, build completely new products, and ensure that Stripe’s product suite works just as well in Southeast Asia as it does in Europe and North America," announced Stripe in its official blog's post.

Singapore hub will include all of the core Stripe functions - product and engineering teams based here will work on expanding the geographic footprint of Stripe’s existing global payments and treasury network, help build completely new products, and further develop the underlying infrastructure powering Stripe, announced the company.

Founded in 2010, by John and Patrick Collison, Stripe provides the technical, fraud prevention, and banking infrastructure required to operate on-line payment systems. Stripe is a Y Combinator startup that counts Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz as its investors.

Stripe provides APIs that web developers can use to integrate payment processing into their websites and mobile applications. In April 2018, the company released anti-fraud tools that run alongside payment APIs to block fraudulent transactions.

While payments is Stripe’s backbone, the startup has also been diversifying and now also includes Stripe Issuing, Stripe Terminal, fraud detection and potentially cash advances, among its various offerings.

The recently launched Stripe Terminal is innovative Point of Sale (PoS) device from the company as unlike any other PoS device, Stripe Terminal is programmable that enable in-person payments for any business model with pre-certified card readers, JavaScript and mobile SDKs, and cloud-based hardware management.

Stripe entering India will be a landmark event not just for country's payment industry but whole fintech space as the Stripe will hopefully compell local payment companies like Alibaba-backed PayTM or Mobikwik to innovate, which until now is "putting everything under single umbrella" in the name of innovation.

Stripe, which operates in 25 countries, charges a fee on each transaction processed through its platform. Its products have expanded to include credit cards, subscription-based billing and debit cards.

The company also announced on Wednesday a number of new customers, including Alphabet Inc's Google, ride-hailing services Didi and Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] and music streaming service Spotify Technology SA.

To recall, in June this year, an another California-based startup Tala, which is named in one of the fastest growing FinTech startups in the world by Forbes, announced the launch of its first engineering hub in Bangalore in order to broaden access to credit and financial services. Tala plans to build India as the hub for its Asian operations.
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