Stripe Gives Atlas LLC Capabilities

Stripe, the digital payment company, pushed forward on its diversification strategy Monday (April 30) with the announcement that it is expanding its Atlas service, which it launched two years ago to help startups get incorporated in Delaware.

According to a report in TechCrunch, Atlas can now be used to create a limited liability company in Delaware. For a cost of $500, the company gets to form a new entity, gets a tax ID, receives a U.S. business bank account and Stripe account, and gets access to tax and legal advice. The service also provides digital tools for filing taxes, as well as access to the Stripe Atlas community for networking and extra resources.

Stripe has created a waiting list for the beta, and should have the service live for testing in the next few weeks, noted the report. “Startups are continuous creation machines, running experiments and re-architecting themselves on the fly,” said Patrick McKenzie, a Stripe Atlas employee. “Legal choices often force startups to predict the future: Is this a side project or the next Google? We think that some founders stop because they aren’t certain yet. So we sought to give founders more options to just get started.”

The report noted that while Stripe won’t break out how many people are using the Atlas service, it did say that 20 percent of technology companies that incorporate as C corps in Delaware use the service.

This isn’t the only new offering Stripe is rolling out. Earlier this month, to simplify the recurring billing process for Software as a Service (SaaS) and subscription-based companies, Stripe has rolled out Billing. The service combines advanced machine learning with automatic card updates to help businesses increase recurring revenue at a time of growth for subscription-based models, the company said in an announcement.

“SaaS, subscription and recurring revenue business models have become a major force for economic growth on the internet,” Jordan McKee, principal analyst at 451 Research, said in a statement. “However, for the vast majority of companies, running a billing and subscription system at any scale is both laborious and costly. Stripe’s new Billing product intends to mitigate this complexity and expense while democratizing access to enterprise-grade billing tools for companies of all sizes.”