Stripe acquires payment processing startup Lemon Squeezy

Payments giant Stripe has acquired a four-year-old competitor, Lemon Squeezy, the latter company announced Friday.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As a merchant of record, Lemon Squeezy calculates and pays global sales tax for digital products, handling legal processing and fees in every country. It primarily serves SaaS and software businesses.

In a post on X, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison announced the acquisition, saying, “Welcome @lmsqueezy! We’re going to scale merchant of record selling in a big way.” And Chief Product Officer Will Gaybrick shared in his own post: “When asked “what should Stripe ship next?” many of you’ve said merchant of record. The Lemon Squeezy team has built an excellent MoR product, and we’re excited to work together with them to help more of you launch to grow!”

In a blog post, Lemon Squeezy co-founder and CEO JR Farr noted that since his 13-person company’s public launch in 2021, that it received “many acquisition offers and (Series A) term sheets from investors.” In one podcast, Farr specifically discussed turning down a $50 million Series A term sheet. (It’s not clear how much, if any, venture funding the startup has raised.)

He added: “But despite the allure of these opportunities, we knew that what we had built was truly special and needed the right partner to take it to the next level. We’re proud to say that we’ve found that partner in Stripe and have gone from idea to acquisition in under three years.”

While he did not share current revenue figures, Farr said that Lemon Squeezy surpassed $1 million in annual recurring revenue nine months after its public launch in 2021.

The founder also said that Lemon Squeezy has been processing payments on Stripe since its inception. 

This isn’t Stripe’s first acquisition this year. In March, the payments giant completed an “acqui-hire” of the four-person team from Supaglue for an undisclosed sum. Supaglue raised a $6.8 million seed round in November 2021, led by Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta.

Supaglue, formerly known as Supergrain, was an open source developer platform for user-facing integrations. 

And last summer, Stripe picked up Okay, a startup that developed a low-code analytics software to help engineering leaders better understand how their teams are performing. Okay was a small startup, with just seven employees, that over time had raised $6.6 million from investors such as Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins after graduating from Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 cohort.

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