The four-year-old Lemon Squeezy, a rival of Stripe, has been bought, the latter company revealed on Friday.
As a merchant of record, Lemon Squeezy manages legal processing and fees in every nation, as well as calculating and paying global sales tax for digital goods. It mostly assists software and SaaS companies.
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison revealed the acquisition in a post on X, writing, “Welcome @lmsqueezy! We’re going to scale merchant of record selling in a big way.” In a separate post, Chief Product Officer Will Gaybrick stated, “When asked “what should Stripe ship next?” many of you’ve said merchant of record. The Lemon Squeezy team has built an excellent MoR product, and we’re excited to work together with them to help more of you launch to grow!”
Co-founder and CEO of Lemon Squeezy JR Farr reported in a blog post that the company has received “many acquisition offers and (Series A) term sheets from investors” since its public launch in 2021. The company employs 13 people. Farr talked about declining a $50 million Series A term sheet on a podcast.
“But we knew that what we had built was truly special and needed the right partner to take it to the next level,” he said, despite the attraction of these chances. We’re happy to report that, in less than three years, we went from idea to acquisition after finding that partner in Stripe.
Farr stated that Lemon Squeezy achieved $1 million in yearly recurring revenue nine months after its public introduction in 2021, though he did not provide current revenue estimates.
Additionally, the creator stated that since the company’s founding, Lemon Squeezy has processed payments through Stripe.
This is not the first acquisition made by Stripe this year. The four-person team from Supaglue was “acqui-hired” by the payments giant in March for an unknown amount. In November 2021, Supaglue successfully raised $6.8 million in a seed round headed by Chetan Puttagunta, general partner of Benchmark.
Formerly called Supergrain, Supaglue was an open-source user-facing integration development platform.
And last summer, Stripe acquired Okay, a startup that created low-code analytics software to assist engineering leaders in understanding the performance of their teams. Okay was a tiny firm with just seven workers that, after graduating from Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 class, eventually raised $6.6 million from investors like Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.