Apple Pay Engine Stripe Launches Atlas, Lets Global Entrepreneurs Quickly Build US Presence

BARCELONA, Spain – Stripe, the online payment processing company, has announced Atlas, a service which will streamline the process of setting up a company in the U.S. together with a U.S. bank account. The service is meant to allow companies from around the world to more easily integrate Stripe into its services.

Atlas, which is initially available as an invite-only beta, was announced at Mobile World Congress by co-founder Patrick Collison, who launched the company just over four years ago with his brother John. Atlas will allows companies anywhere in the world to easily create a U.S. unit and begin accepting payments using Stripes service.

The price of using Atlas will be a one-off fee of $500. The fee will cover the cost of incorporating a company in Delaware, setting up a bank account in association with Silicon Valley Bank and registering with the Internal Revenue Service.

Collison said some companies are already using the service and he demonstrated the sign-up process on stage. The relatively straight-forward process will replace something which typically takes months and considerable capital with a system that can be completed in days. He added that both Stripe and Silicon Valley Bank would be conducting stringent background checks on all companies applying for the service.

Collison said the idea for Atlas came about after he noticed companies using Stripe in countries where it was not operating. When Stripe investigated the matter further it found companies going to extraordinary lengths to set up operations in the U.S. and Europe in order to be able to use Stripe.

Stripe is today used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, many of whom never realize they are using the product. Stripe is the payment processing system which powers Apple Pay as well as the payment systems of Twitter and Facebook and hundreds of startups in 24 countries where the company operates.

It is one of the hottest tech startups in Silicon Valley at the moment, having received a total of $300 million in funding from well-known tech venture capital funds Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz as well as from PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.