On Monday the Samwer Brothers’ accelerator announced significant funding for Paymill, namely €10 million ($13 million) from regular Rocket investor Holtzbrinck Ventures and first-timer Sunstone Capital. The cash will go towards boosting Paymill’s technical platform and customer services.

As with Stripe, Paymill’s raison d’être is to give developers a simple, API-driven way to integrate payments into their sites without having to bear the responsibility of handling sensitive payment details.

However, there’s a pretty big difference, and one which should be familiar to observers of the Samwer Brothers’ standard methods: internationalization. Stripe is available in the U.S. and Canada. Paymill, which launched a mere five months ago, is available across 34 countries in Europe and elsewhere.

As has been the case particularly in the last year or so, Rocket’s cloning ways have proven highly lucrative in terms of investment. Barely a month goes by without the company or one of its many ‘startups’ slurping up tens of millions, with the most enthusiastic investors these days being JP Morgan and Sweden’s Kinnevik.

Indeed, so great is the momentum behind Rocket right now that there’s even a rumor of the company going public. That report is unconfirmed (I’m awaiting a response from Rocket, though not holding my breath) but it does seem remarkably detailed.

Of course, if Rocket does float, it won’t be the Paymill and Payleven stuff that’s high on investors’ priority lists: it will be the dozens of cloned e-commerce operations that Rocket is ramming into Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America. But, that said, there’s clearly plenty of cash flowing into those more technological plays, and there’s no reason to see that stopping anytime soon.

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The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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With Stripe Connect, an online store creator like Shopify or a service like Skillshare, both of whom are customers, can easily enable their sellers to accept payment immediately via Stripe without having to go through the drawn out process of getting a merchant account. Previously, some of their merchants might have manually added Stripe as a payment tool by copying and pasting in API keys, but now these platforms can offer Stripe to all of their sellers. Stripe Connect will be available in the US and Canada, which received Stripe service last month.

Stripe hasn’t said how many customers it has but Stripe Connect is likely to increase the number of merchants that turn to Stripe for payments. Reddit will use Stripe Connect to help communities accept donations while online form builder WuFoo will make it easy for customers to accept one-click payments in their online forms. Fundraising platform Razoo will be able to make payments easier for its non-profit customers.

Stripe Connect won’t just widen payment acceptance, it will also allow customers to connect their payment data easily into analytics tools, CRM systems and accounting software. With Stripe’s API opening up a standardized way to access payment data, customers can plug in a number of tools to better understand what their payment data is telling them. SumAll, for example, will allow Stripe Connect users to see their real-time transaction data along with their web and social data.

In its first year on the market, Stripe has won over a lot of developers and enterprise customers, who appreciate the way the San Francisco company has simplified payment acceptance, making it as easy as connecting to any other API. Stripe has raised $38 million to date including a $20 million round in July with a valuations whispered as high as $1 billion.

Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder, said Stripe Connect, which has been in private beta for six months, is the biggest thing the startup has done since it launched. He expects Stripe Connect can enable a lot more people to participate in the Internet economy.

“So many people on the web should be transacting but they aren’t. This should increase that exponentially,” Collison said.

Collison said previously that the Internet is opening up a lot of opportunities to promote commerce, everything from collaborative consumption startups like Airbnb to online marketplace like Shopify and Etsy.

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Stripe is answering its most frequently asked question — when will you expand beyond the US — with the launch of service in Canada Wednesday. The move follows a limited beta in Canada in the summer with companies including Tarsnap, MetaLab, and Shopify. Now developers north of the border will be able to take advantage of Stripe’s flat pricing, instant setup and the ability to accept all major credit cards.

Expanding to Canada may not sound that challenging but it’s a big step for Stripe. Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder said Canada presented unique problems because it’s controlled by legacy payment processors and also lacks needed infrastructure and facilities. The company had to work with American Express and Wells Fargo, who built custom software to enable the Stripe system to work.

Previously, the process of setting up online payments in Canada was often frustrating for businesses, who had to work mightily to get set up by banks. It could often take months to get approved for a merchant account.

Tobias Lütke, founder of Shopify, said it took months of pleading and thousands of dollars for unnecessary security audits to convince the banks to let it accept payments. And even though it has integrated with 100 different payment systems, he said none of those implementations was as easy as Stripe.

Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison

Collison said moving into Canada has meant Stripe has had to start handling new currencies besides the American dollar. And it’s also learning different ways to acquire information from international businesses. That investment though will pay off as Stripe moves into new markets around the world. Ultimately, Stripe’s goal is  bring payments to anywhere on the Internet, Collison said.

“A lot of the work we did to support more than one country will make it easier to move to other countries,” said Collison. “We’ve put a foundation in place to make this a global payment infrastructure.”

Stripe’s international growth can be good for a seller in Kenya who can’t process payments in Europe or the US. But it’s also helpful for many American startups who struggle with global expansion because setting up payments in each country requires a lot of expertise. If Stripe can expand to a lot of international markets, it can enable a lot more online commerce. It’s going to take some time, but with Canada under Stripe’s belt, we might see more countries on board soon.

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It’s the third of the Samwer brothers’ payment service clones – BillPay already copies BillMeLater and PayLeven apes Square. Like those others, Paymill hews closely to its source material – for instance, Stripe offers developers a simple RESTful API for quickly integrating payment functionality without the hassle of handling card details, and so does Paymill.

Several German online stores have already implemented Paymill, namely DieJeans.de, Tailory.com, Flakegolf.de and mywineportal.com.

Stripe takes a 2.9 percent cut, plus 30 U.S. cents, per transaction. Paymill takes 2.95 percent and 28 euro cents, or 35 U.S. cents. So the Rocket option is a bit pricier – but, then again, it’s available outside the U.S., which Stripe is not. Right now, Paymill is a Germany-only affair, but the likelihood of it staying that way for long is roughly equivalent to that of the Beatles reforming – the homepage is in German, but the documentation is auf Englisch.

I doubt it will be long before we see Paymill raise serious funding, and I’ll stick my neck out and say the cash will come from regular Samwer investors Kinnevik and/or Holtzbrinck Ventures.

Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison had better get a move on with their international expansion.

In their favour, it must be noted that Rocket is yet to create a palpable success in the payments field – their many triumphs have mostly been in straight-ahead e-commerce. On the other hand, when they do figure out how to execute on an idea, they do it fast and comprehensively. Nobody on this planet internationalizes as aggressively as Rocket does.

Emerging markets

Speaking of which, Rocket had a second major announcement on Tuesday: the signing of a deal between it and the mobile operator Millicom, which offers services in Africa and Latin America.

As with all clever carriers, Millicom is big into the diversification game right now, and its deal with the Samwers certainly gives it that. The two outfits are going to “jointly develop franchises in the online sector in Latin America and Africa”. Millicom will have the option over the next four years to gradually buy up controlling stakes in Rocket’s Latin America Internet Holding and Africa Internet Holding subsidiaries.

The two holding companies control eight operating businesses now, and are “required to launch a number of new businesses in Latin America and Africa over the next three years”, according to the statement. Millicom gets 20 percent of both companies when the deal closes, and is expected to up that to 50 percent within two years (the first instalment of €85m will head Rocket’s way in the fourth quarter of this year).

As usual, this is a story of the German company pushing into markets that are largely ignored by the Americans. As Millicom chief Mikael Grahne put it:

“Rocket Internet has a proven track record of rapidly developing successful operations in the online and e-commerce sectors. Millicom has a strong know-how of operating in the fast-moving consumer goods industry in Latin America and Africa… We believe that online services in emerging markets have the potential to go beyond the convenience they successfully brought in developed markets.”

And yes, the two holding companies are working on Rocket’s payments services. Payleven, the Square clone, is already listed as being operational in Brazil.

Will Paymill be close behind? Maybe, maybe not.

Stripe and Paymill make the most sense for new sites that aren’t already plugged into a more complex payments system, and the emerging markets are, by nature, fertile ground for this. Then again, these services will thrive best in a credit-card culture. What makes sense in the U.S. market may not actually be primed for internationalization just yet.

As I’ve said before and will doubtless say again, Rocket is yet to prove itself when it comes to anything other than straight e-commerce. But that doesn’t mean it’s not trying. If there really is an international market for this stuff, the Samwers will probably be the first to nail it.

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The Samwers already have Billpay, a BillMeLater copy that offers secure online payment facilities, and they also recently cloned Square with PayLeven.

Now reports suggest their next target is to produce a copy of Stripe, one of the hottest payment startups out there. The rumor comes from sources quoted by the German publication Gruenderszene.

Stripe is not a million miles away from Billpay, but its big selling point is simplicity. Whereas Billpay’s offering involves direct debit and instalments, Stripe aims to provide an Amazon Web Services-like experience for developers, with an API that allows for very quick deployment.

Most importantly, Stripe — less than a year old — is apparently already valued at half a billion dollars. This is the kind of number that gets the Samwers’ attention.

Right now Stripe is U.S.-only. As we saw just yesterday with the sale of Betreut to the service it copied, Care.com, Rocket specializes in cloning services that have just been too slow to roll out to Europe, south-east Asia, South America or Africa, and offering the same sort of service to those previously denied a look-in (see also the sales of Alando to eBay and CityDeals to Groupon). To my mind, this is where the cloning debate becomes less black-and-white, as a gap in the market is a gap in the market.

Anyhow, there’s more than enough reason to believe the Stripe-clone rumour. It may well be a ploy to sell the clone back to the cloned, but let’s also look and see how the Samwers make the copycat fit in with their existing payments portfolio — and whether the concept translates as well outside the credit-card-centric U.S. as within.

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The truth is, the valuation is actually in the hundreds of millions, not quite half a billion dollars, according to people I’ve talked to. But it’s still a big number for a company that has been working largely in stealth mode and has yet to release any firm customer metrics. And it’s going against big names like PayPal, Visa and Braintree, which is already a favorite of many developers. So is Stripe worthy of the acclaim?

The short answer is: it may not be worth $500 million now but it probably won’t be long before it is.

The company, which has raised $40 million to date, is gaining great word of mouth in the startup community for its payment system. Stripe has created a very simple, next-generation platform for developers, who can deploy payments as if they were hooking up to Amazon Web Services or telephony provider Twilio. Stripe’s developer-friendly product has won over thousands of developers and emerging entrepreneurs, who are able to start taking payments in minutes. The company counts Foursquare, Shopify, 10gen, Fast Company and many others among its customers.

Stripe users don’t have to worry about storing cards, PCI compliance, supporting different card types or dealing with banks. They just work with Stripe’s API and they’re up and running.

“Amazon Web Services was interesting not just because it had better infrastructure necessarily. But by making it so easy and so flexible to build services, different things get built,” said Patrick Collison, who co-founded Striple along with his brother John. “We hear from users that because everyone on their team can use Stripe and because we handle so much stuff for them, we make it easy to launch things and experiment and they end up with different and better products.”

Early investor Ron Conway said at a technology conference in May that Stripe was one of his favorite startups, high praise from a man backing hundreds of companies. “Stripe allows any developers on the Internet, almost through a point and click interface, to enable credit cards on their website,” he said at the time. “It allows people to monetize immediately.”

He’s just one of many big name backers who are staking money on Stripe. General Catalyst led Stripe’s latest round with follow-ons from existing investors Sequoia and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Redpoint Ventures, Chris Dixon and Box CEO Aaron Levie have also joined as new investors. PayPal co-founders Max Levchin and Elon Musk were also early investors.

Stripe is going up against some established players but the startup doesn’t necessarily see itself in competition with PayPal or Braintree. Collison said Stripe has been steadily winning business from new startups and businesses and doesn’t need to steal customers to be a success. That’s because the nature of online commerce is shifting rapidly and opening up new opportunities in the U.S. and abroad.

Now, thanks to platforms like Shopify and Etsy, there are thousands of creators that are launching their own online stores. Mobile is expanding the ability for online commerce to happen anywhere, at any time. And the rise of peer-to-peer start-ups like Uber and Airbnb are also opening up new business opportunities that didn’t exist ten years ago.

One of the biggest hurdles to realizing Stripe’s vision is the fact that it’s limited to the U.S. at present. The company has heard a chorus of requests from developers around the world who are waiting for their country to get Stripe support. Stripe last week launched a beta program in Canada, but there’s no time table for bringing the service to other countries. Collison said Europe is likely the next target after Canada.

Stripe could still hit a rough patch if the startup ecosystem collapses and the bubble bursts. But Stripe isn’t just focused on serving Silicon Valley, said Collison. He believes there’s a huge opportunity in facilitating transactions around the world.

“The overall market is growing so quickly we’d be totally fine if just only new businesses got started on Stripe,” Collison said.

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