At just 26, Irishman John Collison has joined the club for the world’s youngest billionaires, according to the Forbes list.
His fortune is due to Stripe, a company he founded along with his brother Patrick, who is processing online payments for clients like Target, Yelp, Facebook and Lyft; According to the Wall Street Journal, its growth is more than 40% announced by its competitor Square, the company of Twitter co-founder.
Headquartered in San Francisco, the start-up has 726 employees who process billions of dollars in annual transactions in 25 countries.
John is two months younger than Spiegel, the co-founder of Snapchat who treads his heels with a net worth of one hundred hundred million dollars. Last November, Stripe raised a $ 150 million round of financing, which valued the company at nine thousand two hundred million dollars. For each transaction it processes, it obtains 2.9% of the same plus 30 US cents. This represents revenues of about $ 450 million, according to Forbes. The brothers came up with Stripe’s idea during a vacation in South Africa, when John was still a Harvard physics student and Patrick’s math at MIT.
Stripe was launched in September 2011, but three years earlier, the then teenagers had already founded a technology company called Auctomatic, which sold for $ 5 million dollars.
