8. Stripe
Summary
San Francisco-based Stripe makes software that processes payments for e-commerce businesses and became the most valuable private venture-backed company last year, surpassing Elon Musks SpaceX at $95 billion. Musk, along with PayPal alumni Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, were early investors in the companys payments software. Founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison in 2010, Stripe has grown from a tech upstart to a payments powerhouse processing billions of dollars in transactions each year for the likes of Amazon, Google and Shopify. Stripe has been in no rush to go public, with co-founder John Collison saying, "Were very happy as a private company," in an interview with CNBCs Hadley Gamble at the Fintech Abu Dhabi festival in November. The rocky market has hit Stripe directly, with an earlier stage fintech focused on checkout technology that it had led a round of investment in, Fast, shutting down in April.