The business story
Patrick Collison (born 1988, Limerick, Ireland) is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe. A teenage prodigy who won the 2005 BT Young Scientist and briefly attended MIT, he sold his first startup, Auctomatic, at 19, then co-founded Stripe with his brother John in 2010. Stripe collapsed the ordeal of accepting online payments into a few lines of developer-friendly code and grew into the payment rails beneath much of the internet economy — ~$1.9T in annual volume and a ~$159B valuation (Feb 2026), still privately held. Collison is also a noted advocate of "Progress Studies" and the founder of Stripe Press.
Early life and background
Patrick Collison was born in Limerick in 1988 and grew up in Dromineer, County Tipperary, the eldest of three brothers. His mother, Lily, is a microbiologist who also ran a training business; his father, Denis, is an engineer. He took his first computer course at eight and was programming by ten.
In January 2005, at sixteen, he won Ireland's BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition with Croma, a programming language in the Lisp family. He went on to MIT but left soon after.
In 2007 he started a company with his younger brother John, then still at secondary school. After a move to California and a merger with a startup run by Harjeet and Kulveer Taggar, it became Auctomatic, a tool for online marketplace sellers. Live Current Media bought it in March 2008 for a reported $5 million or so, when Patrick was about nineteen. The sale gave the brothers capital, credibility and contacts before either had turned twenty.
Building Stripe
The brothers began their next project in 2010 under the working name /dev/payments. As developers, they had experienced how hard it was to accept money online: merchant-account applications, bank underwriting, awkward gateways and weeks of waiting. Stripe replaced that with a clean, well-documented API, summed up in the promise that a developer could start charging customers with seven lines of code.
From the core API, Stripe added Connect for platforms paying many sellers, Radar for machine-learning fraud detection, Atlas for incorporating a US company online from almost anywhere, and products for billing, in-person payments and card issuing. Patrick serves as CEO; John is president.
The valuation path was uneven. Stripe raised at $95 billion in March 2021, cut about 14 percent of staff in November 2022, and raised at roughly $50 billion in 2023. Employee tender offers then lifted it past the old peak, reaching around $159 billion in February 2026. In 2025 it processed about $1.9 trillion in payments, and it has stayed private.
