How a tiny 4-person startup, Supaglue, caught Stripe’s eye

In Stripe’s annual letter, the company discussed several fast-growing areas, one of which is its “Revenue and Finance Automation” unit. These are tools that help businesses manage billing, taxation and revenue recognition. Stripe’s RFA unit will hit $500 million in annual revenue this year, the company said.

As part of its investment in RFA, the payments giant completed an “evaluation” of the four-person team of Adhesives, for an unknown amount. Supaglue raised a $6.8M round in November 2021, led by Benchmark General Partner Chetan Puttagunta. (Puttagunta did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.)

Supaglue, formerly known as Supergrain, is an open source developer platform for user-facing integrations. At the same time, Stripe is working on real-time analytics and reporting across its platform and in third-party applications for its Revenue and Finance Automation suite. This team will help accelerate that, a Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch.

George Xing and Thomas Chen started Supaglue in 2021 after working on the data teams at Lyft and Uber. While there, they realized that the management of data and business metrics across teams was inconsistent and fragmented, which could lead to poor decisions and even worse business results, Xing told TechCrunch.

So they built a product that helps companies import and aggregate customer data from third-party data sources like Salesforce or other customer relationship management systems into their own applications.

How did a tiny four-person startup attract attention and an acquisition offer from the mighty Stripe? Their mutual work acquaintances introduced them, though Xing and Chen describe meeting Stripe as “pretty crazy.” After people in their extended network made the introduction, and because Supaglue also did a lot of integration work, the two companies started talking, and when Stripe offered to buy them, they accepted.

“A big part of the RFA suite is also a unified data platform that harmonizes data from each of these products and displays relevant information to Stripe end users through dashboards, alerts, customer reports and real-time analytics. It’s very similar to the original problem we solved,” Xing said.

The Supaglue hire is one of many things happening at Stripe so far this year. Between the employee stock sale deal and securing partnerships with companies like identity authentication startup Clerk and fun with electric boat startup Navier, the company has been pretty busy. Given the growth Stripe refers to in its annual letter, Supaglue will likely quickly find friends in the Stripe ecosystem.