Payment processor Stripe’s value has reached $65 billion following a share sale deal with employees. The deal will see Stripe and some of its investors purchase more than $1 billion in stock from current and former employees, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (Feb. 27), citing sources familiar with the matter. The report notes that the $65 billion valuation — up from the $50 billion figure it reached last March — is still lower than the $95 billion valuation it attained in 2021 after bringing in $600 million in funding

Clerk, a startup creating a suite of embeddable UIs, APIs and admin dashboards that app developers can use to authenticate and manage users, has raised $30 million in a Series B round led by CRV with participation from Stripe, Andreessen Horowitz and Madrona.The proceeds bring Clerk’s total raised to $55.5 million, and co-founder and CEO Colin Sidoti says that they’ll be put toward expanding Clerk’s service beyond authentication and into authorization — i.e. determining the permissions a user has versus simply identifying who they are.“Authorization has always been part of our product vision, but we needed a successful authentication product to build atop,” Sidoti told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Clerk’s authentication service had phenomenal growth in 2023, and now there’s a backlog of customers asking for authorization.”Clerk was founded in March 2019 by Sidoti and his brother, Braden. Both are engineers — Colin has a degree from MIT, while Braden graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and previously worked at Uber and Inspirato.Clerk builds developer tools for authentication, offering drop-in components coded in React, the open source frontend JavaScript library. Clerk attempts to detect malicious activity, like bots, while managing user data on behalf of customers.“Despite authentication and authorization being ubiquitous challenges across every software company, they have been exceptionally slow to become outsourced,” Colin said