Silicon Valley-based business-to-business (B2B) payments firm Stripe has launched officially in Malaysia today, the company said in a statement.
The launch follows a USD 250 million fundraising round in September that brought the company’s valuation to USD 35 billion. General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz invested in the round.
Founded in 2010, Stripe provides software as a service in the payments field to businesses of all sizes. It started out by helping e-commerce companies integrate payments into their apps or websites. Today it has expanded to provide a range of financial products such as fraud protection. The company expanded to Singapore in 2016 and established an engineering hub here in 2018.
Malaysia is Stripe’s second Southeast Asian destination. In fact, it has been testing its service in Malaysia since February this year, working with companies like e-commerce solutions platform EasyStore, food delivery service dahmakan, and fashion and retail platform FashionValet.
With this official launch, companies in Malaysia can gain access to Stripe’s entire stack of products to launch, run and scale their businesses. Some of the products are Stripe Connect to run multi-sided marketplaces, Billing for subscriptions and recurring payments, Radar for fraud detection and prevention, and Sigma for analytics.
Stripe also partnered up with Payments Network Malaysia to make Financial Process Exchange (FPX) available in beta in the country. FPX is a payment gateway that allows users to make real-time online payments using bank accounts. The beta version allows businesses on Stripe to accept payments via online bank transfers, along with major credit cards like Visa and Mastercard.
Stripe’s launch in Malaysia occurs timely as the e-commerce sector is expected to reach USD 150 billion by 2025, according to Google-Temasek-Bain’s latest report on the region’s digital economy.
Stripe’s global expansion is driven by the fragmentations within the digital payments market. Prior to Malaysia, the company also launched in central and eastern Europe. Altogether, Stripe today operates in about 40 countries covering 70% of the global economy.