Irish brothers hit Silicon Valley big time after $100 million valuation by Sequoia

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PayPal-founder Peter Thiel invests in Collison brothers' latest venture Stripe.

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Two Limerick brothers, who have been branded as Ireland’s answer to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, are in the money – big time.

Patrick and John Collison now run a Silicon Valley company worth over $100 million after their latest funding round.

The Irish entrepreneurs have just raised $18 million in investment for their Stripe technology company, $17 million of it from one of the world’s top venture capital firms.

Sequoia Capital, early investors in Apple, Google and Yahoo, have just signed the investment deal with the Collison Brothers.

Their fellow investors include PayPal founder Peter Thiel, already set to make a $2.45 billion profit on his investment in Facebook.

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The latest round of funding values Stripe at $100 million, just seven years after one of the brothers won Ireland’s Young Scientist of the Year prize for students.

Their Stripe company is developing an online payments technology that will rival eBay and PayPal.

It allows businesses to sell their products online without having to get an expensive merchant’s bank account to receive credit card payments.

Reports say that Stripe stores the customer details on its own system and deals with the associated compliance matters in a major saving for customers.

Stripe currently employs 17 people at its San Francisco offices.

Silicon Valley lawyer Michael Patrick told the Irish Independent: “The $100m price tag is off the charts, statistically. There must be something red hot here for Sequoia to invest at that valuation. This isn’t naive money.”

Patrick Collison tweeted his excitement at the news. “Huge thanks to everyone who helped us get here,” he said.

The Collison brothers initially became teenage millionaires in 2008 when they sold their first company Automatic for $5m – and famously promised to "fill the fridge."

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