Payment technology company Stripe Inc. is reported to have raised an additional $100 million in funding as it inches toward a possible initial public offering in the next few years.

According to a report in The Information today, the funding came from Tiger Global, the same company that led a round of $245 million in September on a valuation of $20 billion.

The new funding is said to have come in on a valuation of $22 billion, a 10 percent or $2 billion increase in only four months. The funding reportedly is allocated to “growth areas including international expansion.”

Founded in 2010, Stripe processes payments on the websites of its customers as well as offering complementary services for e-commerce customers.

Additional services include Radar that detects fraudulent activity, a subsidiary called Stripe Issuing that allows customers to issue their own debit cards and Stripe Terminal, a program for point-of-sale systems and cash registers that are integrated with Stripe payments. Stripe had previously offered support for bitcoin payments but dropped the feature in January 2018.

Customers include Facebook Inc., SAP SE, Amazon.com Inc., Uber Technologies Inc., Didi Chuxing Technology Co. Ltd. and Spotify Technology S.A.,Target Corp. and the National Football League.

The new funding is very much late-stage, with Stripe set to celebrate its ninth birthday this year. Although it’s not unusual for late-stage companies to raise money, the new funding will once again raise questions as to whether Stripe will eventually go public.

Stripes has long dismissed any notion of taking the company public. Stripe Chief Financial Officer Will Gaybrick is on record in 2016 as saying that the company has “no plans” to go public in the foreseeable future, while Chief Executive Officer Patrick Collison (pictured) reiterated that in April 2017.

When asked the IPO question in September by Forbes, Stripe Chief Operating Officer Claire Hughes Johnson said that “we really don’t have any plans on that” and “we think of ourselves as building infrastructure very long-term and executing on that.”

That said, all venture capital investors look for a return on their investments. No matter what the Stripe C-suite claims, investors will want an exit eventually.

Photo: JD Lasica/Flickr