Stripe Inc., the startup whose technology powers the online payment features of Amazon and numerous other online platforms, is reportedly in talks for a new round of funding at a valuation exceeding $70 billion.

The investment could potentially value San Francisco-based Stripe at as much as $100 billion on the high end. That’s according to Bloomberg, which reported the startup’s funding talks Tuesday afternoon, attributing the information to people familiar with the matter.

The tipsters said that the negotiations are in an early stage and as a result aren’t guaranteed to lead to a deal. They didn’t elaborate on how much Stripe is looking to raise or who are the prospective investors.

Since launching in 2010, Stripe has raised nearly $2 billion for its payments platform, which helps companies process online purchases. The startup counts Amazon.com Inc. and  other major e-commerce players among its customers, as well as consumer technology heavyweights such as Lyft Inc. and a long list of enterprise software-as-a-service providers. That’s on top of millions of smaller businesses around the world.

The success of Stripe’s platform is directly tied to the difficulty of building reliable payments processing software. Developing a custom payments backend from scratch is often impractical, even for enterprises, because it requires writing a large amount of code and comes with cybersecurity challenges. Stripe provides payments processing features via a relatively simple application programming interface that takes as little as a few minutes to integrate into a service.

Stripe also offers a raft of related features to help with other aspects of handling online purchases. It enables companies to accept payments in foreign currencies, from digital wallets such as Apple Pay and from subscription customers who pay on a recurring basis. For the various business teams inside a company, Stripe provides analytics tools they can use to extract customer and financial insights from transactions routed through its platform.

That the startup could reportedly be worth up to $100 billion after its next funding round suggests investors believe it still has plenty of room left to expand. In recent years, Stripe has extended its feature set into several areas adjacent to payments processing, including fraud detection and business registration assistance. A fresh infusion of capital would enable Stripe to accelerate its growth strategy, for example by making acquisitions. 

Stripe’s most recent round, a $600 million investment announced in April, was at a $36 billion valuation. Its investor lineup includes the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Alphabet Inc.’s GV startup fund, among others.

If it materializes, the new financing Stripe is reportedly seeking would add to a series of large rounds closed recently by financial technology startups.

Image: Stripe