Supaglue: The 4-Person Startup That Captured Stripe’s Attention

During its annual letter, Stripe revealed significant growth in several areas, including the “Revenue and Finance Automation” division. This division offers tools for businesses to manage billing, taxes, and revenue recognition. According to Stripe, the RFA division is expected to reach a $500 million annual run rate this year.

As part of its investment in RFA, the payment giant recently completed an “acquihire” of a four-person team from Supaglue. The specifics of the acquisition were not disclosed. Supaglue had previously secured a $6.8 million seed round in November 2021, with support from Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta. (Puttagunta declined to comment on the acquisition when approached by TechCrunch.)

Supaglue, formerly known as Supergrain, is an open-source developer platform designed for user-facing integrations. At the same time, Stripe has been focused on real-time analytics and reporting for its platform and third-party apps within the RFA suite. A Stripe spokesperson stated that the acquired team will help accelerate these efforts.

The founders of Supaglue, George Xing and Thomas Chen, have a background in data teams at Lyft and Uber. They saw firsthand the challenges of managing data and business metrics across teams, leading to inconsistent and fragmented decision-making and potentially negative outcomes. In response, they developed a product that simplifies importing and centralizing customer data from third-party sources, such as Salesforce, into a company’s own applications.

So how did a small four-person startup capture the attention and acquisition offer of powerhouse Stripe? According to Xing and Chen, a mutual work acquaintance made the introduction, describing the connection as “quite serendipitous.” After initial conversations due to their shared focus on integration, Stripe eventually made an offer to acquire Supaglue, which they accepted.

“A big part of the RFA suite is a unified data platform that reconciles information from each tool and presents relevant insights to Stripe’s end users through dashboards, alerts, customer reporting, and real-time analytics. This closely aligns with our original problem-solving goals,” Xing shared.

The Supaglue acquihire is just one of many developments within Stripe this year. From an employee stock sale deal to partnerships with companies like authentication startup Clerk and electric boat startup Navier, the company has had a busy year. Given the growth hinted at in Stripe’s annual letter, it’s likely that Supaglue will quickly find friends within Stripe’s ecosystem.