Stripe

Stripe is a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe processes hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions annually for millions of businesses — from early-stage startups to public companies like Amazon, Google, and Shopify. What started as a simple payment API has evolved into a comprehensive financial platform that handles payments, billing, fraud prevention, banking-as-a-service, and even company incorporation. Stripe's developer-first approach, clean API design, and extensive documentation have made it the default choice for technology companies building internet businesses.

Stripe Elements and Payment Processing

Stripe's core product is its payment processing API, which allows businesses to accept credit cards, debit cards, digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay), bank transfers (ACH, SEPA), and local payment methods across 135+ currencies and 47+ countries. Stripe Elements is a set of pre-built UI components that embed directly into your checkout flow — card input fields, payment request buttons, and full-page checkout forms that handle validation, formatting, and PCI compliance automatically. Elements supports customization to match your brand while ensuring that sensitive card data never touches your servers, dramatically simplifying PCI compliance. For businesses that don't want to build custom checkout, Stripe Checkout provides a hosted, conversion-optimized payment page that requires just a few lines of code to implement.

Stripe Connect: Marketplace and Platform Payments

Stripe Connect is the platform payments product that powers two-sided marketplaces, SaaS platforms with seller payouts, and any business model where money needs to flow between multiple parties. Connect handles the complex logistics of splitting payments, managing sub-merchant onboarding (including identity verification and KYC compliance), issuing 1099 tax forms, and routing payouts to connected accounts. Companies like Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart use Connect to manage payments between customers, service providers, and the platform itself. Connect supports three integration models — Standard (Stripe-hosted onboarding), Express (simplified onboarding), and Custom (full white-label control) — each with different levels of platform responsibility and customization.

Stripe Billing: Subscriptions and Recurring Revenue

Stripe Billing manages the entire subscription lifecycle: creating pricing plans (flat-rate, per-seat, usage-based, tiered), handling upgrades and downgrades, managing proration, retrying failed payments with Smart Retries (machine learning that optimizes retry timing), sending invoice emails, and managing dunning workflows for delinquent accounts. The Customer Portal provides a hosted interface where subscribers can manage their own payment methods, plan changes, and cancellations — reducing support burden. Billing integrates with Revenue Recognition for automated ASC 606 compliance, which is essential for SaaS companies that need auditable financial reporting.

Radar: Machine Learning Fraud Prevention

Stripe Radar uses machine learning trained on data from millions of businesses across the Stripe network to detect and block fraudulent transactions in real time. Because Stripe sees patterns across its entire network (not just your individual business), Radar can identify fraud signals — like a card being used across multiple merchants simultaneously — that standalone fraud tools cannot detect. You can layer custom rules on top of Radar's ML models (e.g., block transactions from specific countries, require 3D Secure for amounts over $500), and the system provides a risk score for every transaction. Radar for Fraud Teams (premium tier) adds manual review queues and advanced analytics for businesses with dedicated fraud operations.

Stripe Terminal, Treasury, and Atlas

Stripe Terminal extends Stripe's online payment capabilities to in-person scenarios with certified card readers and SDKs for building custom point-of-sale applications. This unifies online and offline payments under a single API and dashboard. Stripe Treasury provides banking-as-a-service APIs that let platforms embed financial services — bank accounts, money movement, and card issuance — directly into their products. Atlas is Stripe's startup incorporation service that helps entrepreneurs form a US Delaware C-Corp, obtain an EIN, open a business bank account, and access a network of legal and tax advisors — all online in a few days. Together, these products reflect Stripe's ambition to be the complete financial infrastructure layer for internet businesses.