Stripe Acquires Supaglue to Fuel Growth in Income and Finance Automation
A Strategic Move for Stripe’s RFA Unit
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In its recent annual letter, Stripe highlighted several rapidly expanding areas within its business, including the “Income and Finance Automation” (RFA) unit. This unit focuses on providing tools that empower businesses to effectively manage billing, tax, and revenue recognition processes. Stripe revealed that its RFA unit is projected to reach a $500 million annual run rate this year, demonstrating its significant growth potential.
As part of its strategic investment in RFA, Stripe has acquired the four-person team from Supaglue, an open-source developer platform for user-facing integrations. The financial terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed.
Supaglue, previously known as Supergrain, had raised a $6.8 million seed round in November 2021, led by Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta.
Stripe’s RFA suite is already making waves with its real-time analytics and reporting capabilities across its platform and third-party apps. The acquisition of Supaglue’s team will further accelerate this development, according to a Stripe spokesperson.
Supaglue: Addressing Data Fragmentation in Businesses
George Xing and Thomas Chen, the founders of Supaglue, previously worked on data teams at Lyft and Uber respectively. During their time there, they observed that managing data and business metrics across different teams often resulted in inconsistencies and fragmentation. This lack of centralized data could lead to poor decision-making and ultimately negatively impact business outcomes.
Driven by this experience, Xing and Chen created Supaglue to help companies import and centralize customer data from various third-party sources like Salesforce or other CRM systems into their own applications.
A Serendipitous Meeting Leads to an Acqui-Hire
The acquisition of Supaglue by Stripe was a result of mutual connections within the industry. While Xing and Chen describe meeting Stripe as “fairly serendipitous,” introductions were made through individuals in their extended network. As both companies were engaged in integration work, conversations began, ultimately leading to Stripe’s offer to acquire Supaglue.
“A significant part of the RFA suite is also a unified data platform that reconciles data from each of these products and surfaces relevant insights to the end users of Stripe through dashboards, alerts, customer reporting, and real-time analytics. It’s similar to the original problem we were solving,” Xing explained.
Stripe’s Busy Year: Acquisitions, Partnerships, and Growth
The acquisition of Supaglue is just one of several significant developments for Stripe this year. The company has also seen a surge in employee stock sales and secured strategic partnerships with companies like authentication startup Clerk and electric boat startup Navier. These moves highlight Stripe’s commitment to expansion and innovation across various sectors.
Given the growth trajectory outlined by Stripe in its annual letter, Supaglue is poised to quickly integrate and thrive within Stripe’s ecosystem.
