Stripe alums spark new payments plays

Former Stripe employees have left the digital payments processor to launch a bevy of fintech startups that have helped the sector keep expanding.

The company has become a hotbed of entrepreneurship, particularly for those with ideas in financial technology and, increasingly, new ways to integrate artificial intelligence into business tools.

Stripe curates a culture of curiosity and learning among employees “that exudes from their founders,” said Cyril Mathew, the co-founding CEO of payments startup Latitude Global and a former Stripe cryptocurrency executive.

Two brothers from Ireland, Patrick and John Collison, established the company in 2010, with Patrick serving as chief executive and John as president. Stripe has dual headquarters in Dublin and South San Francisco, California.

Stripe’s founders “are known for being very curious, and they wanted leaders of organizations that were curious,” Mathew said. “Very technical engineers are put into positions where they’re actually not just building things, but they’re thought leaders.”

Stripe has grown into a global payments juggernaut that processes 1.6% of global economic output across some 50 countries. It is now the world’s fourth most valuable venture-backed company, according to Pitchbook data. The company’s $159 billion valuation trails only three companies: AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI, and the parent of TikTok, ByteDance.

The entrepreneurs Stripe has forged are further fueling a payments industry that generates $2.6 trillion in annual revenue, according to a report last week from the consulting firm McKinsey. These include Circuit & Chisel, which builds agentic commerce tools; Increase, a payments and banking services firm; and Latitude Global, a cross-border payments startup.

The startups enter an economy that’s being jostled by trillions of dollars in new AI and cryptocurrency infrastructure investment, potentially reviving investors’ interest in the fintech sector.

Another factor that makes Stripe a nursery for ambitious people is its focus on “this huge base of digital native, internet-first merchants that are online – the customers and partners you’re interacting with are sort of always at the cutting edge,” Mathew said.

Stripe also emphasizes both internally and to the public that it’s a software company – not constrained by a narrow focus on only payments, cryptocurrencies or any of its various businesses, said Louis Amira, a former Stripe executive who left last year to found Circuit & Chisel, which makes tools to enable agentic commerce.

That broader emphasis makes Stripe attractive to a wide range of people who devise ideas for new companies or as a place for entrepreneurs who have chosen to merge their own firms into the company, Amira said last month in an interview.

“I think Stripe is deeply respected across the board and a great place for founders to land,” he said. “Everybody deeply respects Patrick and John (Collison). They seem to be in it for the long term.”

Here’s a look at five companies launched by Stripe alums:

Amira worked as Stripe’s head of crypto and AI partnerships and co-founded Circuit & Chisel with David Noël-Romas, Stripe’s former head of crypto engineering. Both left Stripe in 2025 to co-found Circuit & Chisel, which builds infrastructure for agentic AI bots to maneuver around the internet, with Stripe among the company’s investors.

The two left Stripe “on very, very good terms” to pursue their visions of how to help autonomous AI bots do their tasks, Amira said.

“I think Stripe would have been underwriting a future vision that could have worked, but it was probably a little too far away,” he said. “Once they saw what we were up to and what we built, they were like, ‘Yes, this is a thing that we want to invest in and have a hand in.’”

The New York-based software startup raised $19.2 million in September 2025 to launch ATXP, an agent transaction protocol, to help agents navigate and make payments, connecting AI and commerce with fewer glitches.

Darragh Buckley, a Limerick, Ireland native, lays claim to the title of being Stripe’s first employee, hired by the Collison brothers after he reconnected with childhood acquaintance Patrick Collison while both were studying at MIT.

After six years in a variety of roles at Stripe, Buckley founded Increase in 2020 as a payments company offering application programming interface connections to The Clearing House, the Federal Reserve and card network Visa to enable different payment methods and more flexible banking products.

U.S. banks’ current products aren’t built for other companies to integrate into their own offerings, Buckley said in a June interview. “It isn’t built to build on top of at the kind of scale and pragmatism necessary for the Stripes of the world, so that motivated Increase.”

Increase’s software also handles payroll, bill payments, lending, embedded finance and card issuing. Increase, which counts Stripe as a customer, acquired a small bank in Washington state last year, and in July, Buckley’s startup launched new banking services.

Latitude is a cross-border payments company that focuses on stablecoins and infrastructure for moving digital assets to and from local currencies.

The company, which was founded early last year, has 45 state money transmitter licenses and is working to get the final five, said Mathew, who was a crypto executive when he left Stripe in 2023. Latitude operates in about 50 countries currently, with a target of some 200 in the future, he said.

The company offers infrastructure to help U.S. companies make payments around the world in less than two minutes, Mathew said. Latitude also builds fiat currency on-and-off ramps for neobanks and other companies that want to use stablecoins for their financial apps’ money-transfer capabilities, he said.

“One of the first problems we see them face is ‘How do I get my end-users to get from Mexican peso into that stablecoin or Brazilian real to that stablecoin?’ he said. “So we're building a set of international on and off ramps for those types of companies to take advantage of.”

Mathew co-founded Latitude in 2024 with Brian Wrightson, a former Stripe engineer who serves as chief technology officer, and Vivek Morzaria. The startup has raised $43 million in equity funding, including $35 million announced earlier this month.

The fintech Lemma aims to simplify healthcare practices with business accounts, debit cards and banking services. The company also says it integrates with providers’ electronic health records system to help combine billing data with reconciliation with the EHR.

Lemma was co-founded last year by Diede van Lamoen, Stripe’s former head of international from 2013 to 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile. He is also managing partner of Go Global Ventures, a San Francisco-based VC firm.

“There is a particular version of effortless grinding with a smile on your face that defined early Stripe,” Van Lamoen wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, responding to comments from Buckley about Stripe’s early days. “It’s what I loved most and miss most.”

As agentic commerce expands, merchants will need to address their non-human shoppers in different ways, using new approaches and technologies.

New Generation builds tools for merchants to prepare for agentic commerce, including an e-commerce platform optimized for AI, co-founder Adam Behrens said in an interview in January. New Generation’s tools are designed to help expose merchants’ online offerings to this new era of digital commerce.

“The imperative for a merchant becomes thinking about, ‘How am I going to expose my brand, my data, my products, to this ecosystem in a way that I maintain some level of control, that I still benefit from it, that it translates to real revenue?’” Behrens said. Merchants also want to remain technically flexible to pivot to new AI tools that may amass millions of users, he added.

The San Francisco company was co-founded two years ago by Behrens, a former Stripe product manager, and Jonathan Arena, who is now CEO. Behrens left New Generation in July and now serves as an adviser, according to his LinkedIn profile.