Stripe Looks To Dethrone PayPal With Backing From Peter Thiel And Elon Musk

PayPal has been around for many years now and is the standard for paying for things on eBay. PayPal is generating huge revenues and is the source of some significant ire for many online shoppers. I know many users of PayPal have been waiting for quality alternative for a long time. It looks like the quality alternative could possibly be a new startup called Stripe. Interestingly, some of the founders of PayPal are backing Stripe.

Stripe counts among its backers Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, which is rather interesting to me. Those two backers must think Stripe has a chance to compete with PayPal considering they helped start PayPal. Theil and Musk aren't the only backers of Stripe; Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz also back the startup. The brain trust behind Stripe are brothers Patrick and John Collison from Limerick, Ireland.

The two brothers dropped out of MIT and Harvard to focus on starting up Stripe. Stripe is a streamlined service that will allow people to accept payments on the web very easily and the team is working on cutting out the clutter from the service. The goal is to allow Stripe handle all the details of web-based transactions so there is no need for subscriptions or gateways for flat rate of 2.9% and $0.30 per transaction. Those rates would probably appeal to many online sellers and I hope Stripe can give PayPal a run for its money.

[via Fastcompany]