General Catalyst Partners is to invest $10 million in venture capital for market-changing businesses and applications built on the Stripe Connect platform.
The Stripe Connect API enables businesses to connect their Stripe account (and their Stripe data) with other services. The fast-growing firm has recently scored potent integration deals with Twitter, Facebook, and Apple, and the new fund is likely to accelerate its development still further.
Hemant Taneja, managing partner at General Catalyst, comments: "It's not often that we see the formation of an important new application platform - there are only a few in each decade. Facebook, Google, Apple, Salesforce, Microsoft… when it works, it's a massively potent force. In Stripe Connect, we see the potential to build entirely new classes of services that enable businesses to better leverage their payments capabilities and data."
The GC Stripe Platform Fund is geared primarily toward seed-stage startups, with investment dollars likely to range from $250K-$500K.
The first investment is a $500K bet on Baremetrics, which provides analytics on Stripe data for software-as-a-service businesses, including real-time metrics on monthly recurring revenue, lifetime value, run rate and churn.
To apply for funding, startups can send an email with a one-page summary of the company's vision and focus, a description of the team (including links to LinkedIn profiles and/or GitHub repositories), and a link to the app or product URL to GC_StripeEcosystem@generalcatalyst.com. GC has committed to making an investment decision within one week of an initial meeting.