Payments infrastructure firm Stripe said yesterday it has picked Singapore as the site for its Asia-Pacific engineering hub.
The facility will build and expand Stripe's global payments and treasury network for the company's growing user base in the region.
Stripe also announced a new US$245 million (S$334 million) fund-raising round, which reportedly values the company at US$20 billion. The funding is led by Tiger Global Management, with DST Global and Sequoia Capital joining.
Stripe's head for South-east Asia and Hong Kong, Ms Piruze Sabuncu, said the 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."
Mr Patrick Collison, chief and co-founder of Stripe, added that the company believes in the contingency of progress.
"Better global payments infrastructure will increase economic output, encourage entrepreneurship, and help upstarts compete with incumbents. By bringing Stripe into more markets and building out our capabilities for companies of all sizes, we hope to accelerate innovation around the world."
Stripe will hire an engineering head for the Asia-Pacific, in addition to engineering managers, back-end and API (application programming interface) engineers, and full stack engineers. These will be based at the engineering hub in Singapore as part of a distributed global engineering team.
Stripe also has global engineering hubs in San Francisco, Seattle and Dublin.
Founded in 2010, Stripe builds the "economic infrastructure for the Internet". Businesses of every size - from start-ups to public companies such as Salesforce and Microsoft - use its software to accept online payments and run technically sophisticated financial operations in more than 130 countries.
In the past year, nearly 70 per cent of Singaporeans bought something through Stripe's payments infrastructure, the company said. Its Singapore clients include Grab, Honestbee and CapitaLand.
Singapore was Stripe's first entry point into Asia in 2016, and the latest announcement came on the company's second official anniversary in the country.
