Stripe's Valuation Soars to $91.5 Billion, Driven by AI and Stablecoin Investments

Stripe Hits $91.5B Valuation as Founders Call Stablecoins 'Superconductors' of Finance

Stripe, led by President and Co-founder John Collison (pictured), has announced a tender offer valuing the firm at $91.5 billion, while signalling its increased bullishness on stablecoins. Credit: Christophe Morin/IP3, Getty Images. Payments giant Stripe has announced a tender offer for employees and shareholders valuing the firm at $91.5 billion. The move comes as the company highlighted the important rol stablecoins will play in its future, labeling stablecoins as the "superconductors" of finance. Stripe's Soaring Valuation The company's $91.5 billion valuation represents a significant rebound, marking a 41% increase from its $65 billion valuation in 2024. Stripe's newest valuation is nearing its 2021 peak of $95 billion. Reports of the tender offer follow Stripe's publication of its annual letter , which revealed the firm's total payment volume had increased 38% to $1.4 trillion in 2024. The company attributed its success to significant investments in AI and machine learning. "We attribute this year's rapid growth in part to our long-standing investments in building machine learning and artificial intelligence into our products," Stripe wrote in the letter. Stripe's Stablecoin Focus Within the annual letter, Stripe also highlighted the importance they feel stablecoins will hold over the next few years: "In each of the last six years, Stripe has reinvested a much higher proportion of our earnings in R&D than any comparable company." "We believe this ability will prove particularly important in the coming years, as stablecoins, AI, and other forces reshape the landscape," Stripe added. In October, Stripe acquired stablecoin orchestration platform Bridge. The company enables businesses to do "almost anything with stablecoins," the company wrote. Stripe called stablecoins the "superconductors" of finance, stating that they will help make "economies more prosperous." "Consider the transitions from coins to banknotes, from the gold standard to fiat currency, and from paper instruments to electronic payments," Stripe wrote. "Stablecoins are a new branch of the money tree." Wider Stablecoin Adoption The news comes as stablecoins have been gaining widespread attention from major players in the payments industry. According to Bloomberg, PayPal wants to increase its stablecoin ambitions in 2025. It aims to offer its PYUSD stablecoin as an option for millions of its small-to-medium-sized merchants. Michelle Gill, general manager of PayPal's small business and financial services group, told Bloomberg that "a lot of the payments we're expecting are going to be cross-border because merchants in the U.S. are seeking to pay vendors and suppliers abroad."

Stripe hits $91.5bn valuation as AI investment pays off

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. Stripe and investors will repurchase shares to provide liquidity to current and former employees, says the company. The valuation sees Stripe's valuation bounce back to close to its 2021 peak from the $50 billion price tag it had at a funding round in March 2023. News of the tender offer comes as Stripe publishes its annual letter, revealing that the firm's total payment volume increased to $1.4 trillion in 2024, up 38% year-on-year, and equivalent to around 1.3% of global GDP. Cofounders Patrick and John Collison attribute the growth to long-standing investments in AI that "continue to pay off, increasing revenue for existing customers, encouraging more businesses to switch to Stripe, and helping new companies reach significant scale unprecedentedly quickly". The letter also highlights the growing relevance of stablecoins. Last year, Stripe acquired stablecoin orchestration platform Bridge and is already helping some of the world's largest organisations to assemble related strategies. "Improvements to the basic usability of money make economies more prosperous. Consider the transitions from coins to banknotes, from the gold standard to fiat currency, and from paper instruments to electronic payments. Stablecoins are a new branch of the money tree. Such transitions occur with some regularity over the centuries, and the effects tend to be large," writes the Collisons.

Stripe's valuation climbs to $91.5 billion in secondary stock offer

John Collison, president and co-founder of Stripe.Christophe Morin | IP3 | Getty Images Stripe announced a tender offer for employees and shareholders on Thursday that values the payments startup at $91.5 billion, the closest the company has been to its peak valuation of $95 billion in 2021. "We very much care about providing good liquidity for employees and existing shareholders," Stripe co-founder and President John Collison told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview on "Squawk Box." As for the company's long-awaited public market debut, Collison said, "We are not dogmatic on the public vs. private question," and "have no near-term IPO plans." Stripe also revealed in its annual letter on Thursday that it generated $1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38% from the year prior. The company said it was profitable in 2024, and expects to remain so this year. Collison said the business can't be managed on a "super tight quarterly EPS basis because this growth tends to come in waves." Stripe ranked third on CNBC's Disruptor 50 List for 2024, jumping from the 28th position in 2023. Collison said the artificial intelligence boom has been key to the company's recent growth. High-profile AI startups OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Mistral are all Stripe clients. "Unlike maybe previous booms that were more speculative in nature where you had asset price speculation, here we are seeing an AI boom that is very real," Collison said. "There's a bunch of companies that have grown and grown and grown over the past few years, but they've grown because they have real revenue and they have real revenue because they have customers that find their products really useful." More than 700 AI agent startups launched on Stripe last year, according to the company's annual letter. Collison said a future where agents will make purchases for human customers is inevitable. Founded in 2010, Stripe has regularly conducted tender offers to allow early investors and employees to sell a portion of their equity in order to reduce the pressure to go public. A year ago the company announced a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation.

Stripe bounces back to $90bn-plus valuation on back of AI demand

Stripe has shot back to a valuation of more than $90bn, in a sign of rebounding fortunes for financial technology businesses that have been boosted by a surge in demand from artificial intelligence companies. The Irish-American payments and billing company is selling shares to investors as a way of letting long-term employees cash out their stakes. The sale gives Stripe a valuation of $91.5bn, up from $70bn six months ago and close to the company's peak valuation of $95bn in 2021. The deal also eases any pressure on the 14-year-old company to launch an initial public offering. John Collison, Stripe's president and co-founder along with his brother Patrick, said Stripe had "no plans to IPO". "We've stayed private longer than most tech companies, and that's been a positive," he said. "We can plough profits back into R&D [research and development]. But we're not dogmatic . . . We decide what's best for the business on an ongoing basis." The company has been profitable for the past two years and will continue to be profitable for the foreseeable future, Collison added, without giving specific figures. Stripe was one of the most high profile of a group of Silicon Valley start-ups that rode ultra-low interest rates and a massive increase in the amount of capital flowing to private companies in the years leading up to 2022. But a steep rise in interest rates and growing economic uncertainty as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine caused a sharp reversal for start-up valuations, with Stripe plunging from its peak valuation of $95bn to $50bn in 2023. The company has since rebounded, along with other fintech start-ups including Chime and Klarna, both of which are preparing to go public. Collison said high valuations for private companies were more sustainable now than they had been at the crest of an investment frenzy in 2021 and 2022, largely owing to the impact of AI on companies' revenue and growth. "Prior booms perhaps had a more speculative flavour. These [AI] companies that are very fast-growing have very steep revenue ramps, because the products are very useful. You should be able to see real impact," he said, citing reductions of fraud and an increase in payment success rates. Individual companies may be hit. But he added: "Is this going away as a sector? Absolutely not. Companies are voraciously buying what [AI start-ups] OpenAI, Anthropic and Cursor have to sell because it provides use to them. You can have self-referential speculative bubbles like crypto, but AI is driven by real utility." Stripe processed $1.4tn in payments in 2024, up 40 per cent on 2023, in what the company described as an "unusually good year". The group plans to process a greater number of payments made using stablecoins, which track the price of a reserve sovereign currency, after acquiring stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1bn last year.

Stripe Says AI Boom Drove 38% Increase in Payment Volume | PYMNTS.com

Stripe's investments in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) contributed to the financial infrastructure platform's rapid growth in 2024, co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison wrote in their annual letter to the Stripe community that was released Thursday (Feb. 27). "These bets continue to pay off, increasing revenue for existing customers, encouraging more businesses to switch to Stripe, and helping new companies reach significant scale unprecedentedly quickly," they wrote. Stripe's total payment volume rose 38% in 2024 to reach $1.4 trillion, according to the letter. In a separate announcement, the company said Thursday that a tender offer designed to provide liquidity to current and former Stripe employees was made at a valuation of $91.5 billion. The company will repurchase shares alongside investors. Stripe was valued at $65 billion after a share sale deal in February 2024, Bloomberg News reported at the time. The AI boom driving growth at Stripe includes demand for Stripe Billing's ability to manage active subscriptions and serve as the "revenue engine of the AI era," partnerships with AI companies that are reaching annualized revenue milestones more quickly than software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, and AI agents that are using the company's solutions for optimized checkout and spending money with virtual cards. "Overall, we are ensuring that Stripe is well-positioned to serve the next chapter of the economy," Patrick and John Collison wrote in the letter. Looking at another trend in the payments landscape, they wrote that the proliferation of vertical SaaS solutions has enabled small businesses to better compete with franchisees and has boosted demand for Stripe to power the platforms' payment services. "This in turn highlights why internet-native, programmable financial services are so important: they're the foundation that vertical SaaS platforms need to flourish," Patrick and John Collison wrote. Another trend in the industry is "industrialized fraud" that is led by teams of engineers, managers and data analysts and costs the typical online business 3% of their revenue. Stripe combats this fraud with its reputation network that is informed by data from the company's transaction data that includes credit cards, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses, devices and other details. With this data, Stripe's systems can detect suspicious behavior. "Data from $1.4 trillion in annual payments volume means that each payment makes the next payment safer, a flywheel spinning with now-considerable momentum," the Collisons wrote. The letter also highlighted stablecoins, saying that Stripe is helping enterprises assemble their stablecoin strategies and that the company is seeing stablecoins used to manage corporate treasuries, send remittances, facilitate dependable savings in countries with unstable currencies, and enable payments from companies with low card penetration. "Stablecoins have four important properties relative to the status quo," Patrick and John Collison wrote. "They make money movement cheaper, they make money movement faster, they are decentralized and open-access (and thus globally available from day one), and they are programmable." Stripe continues to invest in research and development as it expects AI, stablecoins and other forces will "reshape the landscape," according to the letter. Its solutions are helping established businesses modernize their operations or reinvent their business models, the letter said. Businesses are adopting these solutions to make more money by optimizing every part of the transaction and to keep up with the evolving payments landscape. "Businesses need to adapt to the proliferation of new payment methods and business models, the growing sophistication of fraudulent actors, the ever more exacting expectations of consumers, and the transformation in the commerce experience instigated by AI," Patrick and John Collison wrote.

Stripe CEO says AI startups are growing faster than SaaS ever did and calling them wrappers 'misses the point' | TechCrunch

In its annual letter released Thursday, payments giant Stripe declared that it was "seeing an AI boom" with its data revealing that artificial intelligence startups are growing more rapidly than traditional SaaS companies have historically. In a chart, Stripe showed that the top 100 AI companies (by revenue) were able to achieve $5 million in annualized revenue in 24 months in 2024 compared to the top 100 SaaS companies taking 37 months in 2018 to reach the same milestone. "Our 2024 data shows these startups are building businesses at record pace," wrote Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison. Specifically, Collison pointed to AI-powered coding assistant Cursor exceeding $100 million in revenue, Lovable hitting $17 million in ARR "in just 3 months," and Bolt achieving $20 million in ARR in two months' time as examples of this AI boom. "Much as SaaS started horizontal and then went vertical (first Salesforce and then Toast), we're seeing a similar dynamic playing out in AI: we started with ChatGPT, but are now seeing a proliferation of industry specific tools," he wrote. "Some people have called these startups 'LLM wrappers'; those people are missing the point." Stripe said that new industry-specific AI tools are helping those players "properly realize the economic impact of LLMs and that the contextual, data, and workflow integration will prove enduringly valuable." As evidence of that, Collison pointed to startups such as Abridge, Nabla and DeepScribe as helping to revamp patient and medical care as well as architects using SketchPro. Along that same vein, Stripe is still quite bullish on vertical SaaS, especially as it relates to small businesses, noting that 6.3% of SMBs powered by vertical SaaS platforms on Stripe earn $1 million in total revenue in their first year -- nearly 60% more than in one benchmarked comparison set. The letter also noted that payment volume in 2024 grew to $1.4 trillion, up 38% on the year before. The company on Thursday also confirmed a tender offer where investors will buy up shares from those employees at a valuation of $91.5 billion. Stripe said it will also repurchase shares as part of the transaction.