How Supaglue, a Small 4-Person Startup, Caught the Attention of Stripe
Stripe’s annual letter highlighted the rapid growth of its “Revenue and Finance Automation” (RFA) unit, which offers tools to assist businesses in managing billing, tax, and revenue recognition processes. The company anticipates that its RFA unit will achieve a $500 million annual run rate in the current year, indicating significant traction in this segment.
To bolster its capabilities in this area, Stripe recently completed an “acqui-hire” of a four-person team from Supaglue, although the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Supaglue, formerly known as Supergrain, is recognized for its open-source developer platform designed for user-facing integrations. The startup had previously raised a $6.8 million seed round led by Chetan Puttagunta, a general partner at Benchmark, in November 2021.
The acquisition of Supaglue’s team aligns with Stripe’s focus on enhancing real-time analytics and reporting capabilities across its platform and third-party applications, particularly within the RFA suite. The team from Supaglue, led by founders George Xing and Thomas Chen, brings valuable expertise gained from their previous roles at tech companies such as Lyft and Uber, contributing to Stripe’s efforts to advance its offerings in financial automation and analytics.
Supaglue’s product, which facilitates the import and centralization of customer data from third-party sources like Salesforce into clients’ applications, caught the attention of Stripe due to its relevance to Stripe’s efforts in the Revenue and Finance Automation (RFA) unit. The introduction between the two companies was facilitated by mutual work acquaintances, and subsequent conversations revealed synergies between Supaglue’s capabilities and Stripe’s needs.
The acquisition offer from Stripe was accepted by Supaglue’s founders, George Xing and Thomas Chen, as they saw alignment between their work and Stripe’s focus on providing a unified data platform for reconciling and surfacing insights from various products within the RFA suite. This unified data platform serves end users with dashboards, alerts, customer reporting, and real-time analytics, addressing a problem similar to the one Supaglue initially set out to solve.
Despite being a small four-person startup, Supaglue’s acquisition by Stripe reflects the growing importance of data integration and analytics in today’s business landscape. The acquisition aligns with Stripe’s broader initiatives, which include securing partnerships with other companies like authentication startup Clerk and electric boat startup Navier, as well as addressing the significant growth opportunities highlighted in its annual letter. With Supaglue now part of Stripe’s ecosystem, it is poised to contribute to Stripe’s ongoing efforts and potentially find new avenues for growth within Stripe’s vast network of clients and partners.
