San Francisco-based Stripe, which provides the online payments backbone for Instacart, Lyft, Twitter, Apple Pay and more than 100,000 other companies, is setting up a new engineering office in Seattle, GeekWire has learned.
The company, which has raised more than $300 million in venture funding and boasts a valuation of $5 billion, plans to open the new office next year, according to a source with the knowledge of the company’s plans. Location details and size of the office were not known, and the company declined to offer details.
Stripe is the latest of Silicon Valley powerhouse to arrive on the shores of Seattle — mining the region for its top tech talent. In fact, GeekWire has compiled a list of more than 80 companies that have established engineering offices in the region in recent years, a trend that was kicked off in a big way by Google when it first established an engineering office in the region about 10 years ago. Google now has more than 1,900 employees in the Seattle area, split between campuses in Fremont and Kirkland.
Other recent arrivals have included Uber, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Qualtrics, Groupon and Salesforce — a trend which has radically altered the tech ecosystem of Seattle, diversifying the landscape beyond its historic roots in companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Expedia.
Founded in 2009 and led by 28-year-old Irish-born entrepreneur Patrick Collison, Stripe now employs more than 500 people. Its backers include Sequoia Capital, Visa, American Express, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
