Payments giant Stripe has acquired four-year-old competitor Lemon Squeegee, the company announced on Friday.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Lemon Squeezy describes itself as the “merchant of record” that calculates and pays worldwide sales tax on digital products and handles legal procedures and fees in each country. It primarily serves SaaS and software businesses.
In a post by X, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison announced the acquisition by saying, “Hello, @lmsqueezy! We're going to significantly expand merchant of record sales.” Chief Product Officer Will Gaybrick also said in his own post, “When people ask me, 'What should Stripe release next?' many of them say merchant of record. The Lemon Squeezy team is building a great MoR product, and we're excited to work with them to help even more of them launch and grow.”
Lemon Squeezy co-founder and CEO JR Farr said in a blog post that the company has “received numerous acquisition offers and[Series A]term sheets from investors” since going public in 2021. In one podcast, Farr specifically talked about turning down a $50 million Series A term sheet. (It's unclear how much venture funding the startup has raised.)
He added: “But despite the allure of these opportunities, we knew what we'd built was truly special, and we needed the right partner to take it to the next level. We found a partner in Stripe and are proud to have gone from idea to acquisition in less than three years.”
Farr declined to share current revenue figures, but said Lemon Squeegee surpassed $1 million in annual recurring revenue in the nine months since its public launch in 2021.
The founders also noted that Lemon Squeezy has been processing payments with Stripe since its inception.
This isn't Stripe's first acquisition this year: In March, the payments giant “acquisition hired” a four-person team from Supaglue for an undisclosed amount. Supaglue raised a $6.8 million 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 Supergrain, is an open source development platform for user-facing integrations.
And last summer, Stripe acquired Okay, a startup that developed low-code analytics software to help engineering leaders better understand their team's performance. Okay was a tiny startup with just seven employees that raised $6.6 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins after graduating from Y Combinator's Winter 2020 class.