Payment technology company Stripe raised $245 million in new funding at a $20 billion valuation. Bloomberg was first to report the news, which was confirmed to Axios by Stripe co-founder John Collison.

Why it matters: This will only heat up IPO speculation around Stripe, which to date has refused to even give a tentative timeline.

Collison says that the entire round is primary capital, and that much of it will be used to finance international expansion (today the San Francisco-based company announced a new engineering hub in Singapore). It also should enable Stripe to handle more large accounts, such as relatively new clients like Uber, Didi Chuxing and Spotify.

• The round included new investors Tiger Global and DST Global, and Collison said that Stripe's 5-person board of directors now includes Jonathan Chadwick (ex-VMWare) and Michelle Wilson (ex-Amazon).
• The rest of the board includes Collison, his brother Patrick (CEO of Stripe) and longtime investor Michael Moritz (Sequoia Capital).

Stripe earlier this year gave up on allowing Bitcoin as a payment method, with Collison saying today: "We are very interested in crypto long term and follow it closely. Bitcoin wasn’t a great payment experience for anyone though."

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