Stripe Opens Office In Mexico City

Payments startup Stripe has announced that it’s opening up an office in Mexico City to take advantage of opportunities for growth in the Latin American region, according to a report by CNBC.

Stripe said it wants to get engineers from the area and take advantage of the fast-growing mobile payment and eCommerce sectors.

Stripe was started in San Francisco, and it competes with Square and Adyen to help businesses facilitate payments over the internet.

It’s a popular choice for venture capitalists, and it has a valuation of $22.5 billion, with investors like Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Google’s venture outfit Capital G, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins and other notable names in the space.

Stripe Chief Business Officer Billy Alvarado said that the activity in the region made the move an easy choice.

“Our goal is to make sure that the internet works the way it was intended to — it should be global, and it should be borderless,” Alvarado said. “There’s a very rich ecosystem for us in Latin America.”

Softbank has also been making moves in the region, and it recently said it was going to use a $5 billion fund to invest across Latin America.

Stripe has recently been expanding all over the globe, in places like Estonia, Poland, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia and Malaysia.

Stripe will work with startups in South and Latin America, it said, and also with legacy companies like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and CitiBank. Stripe was founded in 2010 by two Irish brothers named Patrick and John Collison, who got the idea for the company while attending Harvard and MIT. It was recently announced that former Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene was joining the company’s board.

“We really want to lean into global commerce, and this is central to building an internet platform for economic progress,” Alvarado said. “There’s no question that there are strong headwinds.”