Payments giant Stripe has acquired four-year-old rival Lemon Squeezy, the latter announced Friday.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
As a merchant of record, Lemon Squeezy calculates and pays global sales tax on digital products, handles legal processing and fees in all countries, and primarily targets SaaS and software companies.
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison announced the acquisition in a post on X, saying, “Welcome @lmsqueezy! We’re going to be massively scaling merchant of record.” And Chief Product Officer Will Gaybrick said in his post, “When asked, ‘What should Stripe launch next?’ many of you said merchant of record. The Lemon Squeezy team has built a great MoR product and we’re excited to partner with them to help more people launch and grow it!”
In a blog post, Lemon Squeezy co-founder and CEO JR Farr noted that the 13-person company has “received a lot of acquisition offers and (Series A) term sheets from investors” since going public in 2021. In one podcast, Farr specifically discussed rejecting a $50 million Series A term sheet. (It’s unclear how much venture capital the startup has raised.)
He added: “But despite the allure of this opportunity, we knew that what we were building was truly special and that we needed the right partner to take it to the next level. We found that partner in Stripe, and we’re proud to have gone from idea to acquisition in less than three years.”
While he wouldn't share current revenue figures, Parry said Lemon Squeezy surpassed $1 million in annual recurring revenue just nine months after its official launch in 2021.
The founders said Lemon Squeezy has been processing payments on Stripe since its founding.
This isn’t Stripe’s first acquisition this year. In March, the payments giant “acquired” a four-person team from Supaglue for an undisclosed amount. Supaglue raised $6.8 million in a seed round led by Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta in November 2021. (Puttagunta did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.)
Supaglue, formerly known as Supergrain, was an open source developer platform for user-centric integrations.
And last summer, Stripe acquired Okay, a startup that developed low-code analytics software to help engineering leaders better understand how their teams are performing. Okay was a small startup with just seven employees, but after graduating from Y Combinator’s winter 2020 cohort, it raised $6.6 million from investors like Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
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