In Stripe's annual letter, the company describes several fast-growing areas, one of which is its “revenue and financial automation” division. These are tools that help businesses manage billing, taxes, and revenue recognition. The company says that Stripe's RFA division will reach an annual operating rate of $500 million this year.
As part of its investment in RFA, the payments giant completed the “acquisition” of a four-person team from Supaglue for an undisclosed sum. Supaglue raised $6.8 million in a seed round in November 2021 led by Benchmark General Partner Chetan Puttagunta. (Puttagunta did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.)
Supaglue, formerly known as Supergran, is an open source developer platform for user-facing integrations. At the same time, Stripe is working on real-time analytics and reporting across its Revenue and Finance Automation suite of platforms and third-party apps. A Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch that the team will help accelerate that.
George Xing and Thomas Chen founded Supaglue in 2021 after working on data teams at Lyft and Uber. While there, he realized that the management of data and business metrics across teams was inconsistent and fragmented, which could lead to bad decisions and even worse business outcomes, Xing told TechCrunch told.
So they built a product that helps companies import and centralize customer data from third-party data sources like Salesforce and other customer relationship management systems into their applications.
How did a small startup of four people gain attention and receive an acquisition offer from the mighty Stripe? Shin and Chen describe their encounter with Stripe as “pretty much serendipitous.” A mutual business acquaintance introduced them. After people in the extended network made introductions, and because he had also done a fair amount of integration work for Supaglue, the two companies started a dialogue, and when Stripe made an acquisition offer, both companies accepted.
“A large part of the RFA suite is also a unified data platform that orchestrates data from each of these products and provides relevant insights to Stripe’s end users through dashboards, alerts, customer reports, and real-time analytics. It’s very similar to the original problem we were solving,” Xing said.
The Supaglue acquisition is one of many things happening at Stripe so far this year. Between employee stock sales deals, securing partnerships with companies like certification startup Clerk, and a fun deal with electric boat startup Navier, the company has been pretty busy. Given the growth that Stripe hinted at in its annual letter, Spaglue believes he will soon find friends within the Stripe ecosystem.