Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, has signed agreements with investors to provide liquidity to current and former Stripe employees through a tender offer at a $91.5B (€87.3B) valuation, the closest the company has been to its peak valuation of $95 billion in 2021. Alongside investors, Stripe will also repurchase shares, according to the press release.
“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.”
Businesses on Stripe generated $1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38% from the prior year. Stripe now serves half of the Fortune 100, 80% of the Forbes Cloud 100, and 78% of the Forbes AI 50.
In their annual letter to the Stripe community, cofounders Patrick and John Collison attributed the rapid growth to long-standing investments in artificial intelligence 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…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’s growth to date is evidence of the intense market demand for programmable financial services. The associated transformation is still early.”
AI investments fuel revenue growth for businesses on Stripe
Half of the Fortune 100 now uses Stripe and the company continues to attract the world’s largest businesses—including NVIDIA, PepsiCo, NewsCorp, and Comcast—as they seek to reinvent their business models and grow revenue from existing activity.
Stripe has invested in AI models that are delivering significant revenue and performance uplifts for its users. Hertz increased authorization rates by 4% when it moved its payments to Stripe, while Forbes saw a 23% boost in revenue with Stripe managing its subscription payments. Carsharing marketplace Turo captured $114 million in additional annual revenue with Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite.
“We’re continually retraining dozens of machine learning models that optimize every part of the transaction flow over an economy-scale dataset. The resulting optimizations are big enough that businesses see them in their topline revenue figures. Businesses simply start making more money when they switch to Stripe,” the Collisons wrote.
Durable profitability underpins significant R&D investments
Stripe is profitable, and expects to remain so in the coming years. This allows the company to invest much of its operating earnings back into research and development to help its users navigate the changing business landscape.
One example of such an investment is Stripe Billing, which is now used by more than 300,000 companies and manages nearly 200 million active subscriptions. Stripe’s Revenue and Finance Automation Suite, with Billing at its core, recently passed a $500 million revenue run rate.
The AI boom is happening on Stripe
Stripe is already the revenue engine of the AI era, with 78% of the Forbes AI 50 building on its platform (including all of the AI 50 that are currently selling a product online).
The company’s data reveals that top AI startups are building businesses at record pace, hitting $5 million in annualized recurring revenue 13 months faster than earlier comparable software companies. Cursor raced to over $100 million in ARR in just three years, Lovable hit $17 million ARR in 3 months, and Bolt reached $20 million ARR in just two months.
With AI set to change how online commerce works, Stripe is also optimizing its products for AI agents. Over 700 agent startups launched on Stripe last year, and the company revealed that its toolkit for developers building AI agents is already being downloaded thousands of times a week. ElevenLabs used Stripe’s toolkit to let a voice agent autonomously manage subscriptions and refunds, while Perplexity and Payman are using Stripe to enable new agentic ways to spend and move money.
To learn more about Stripe’s business in 2024, and some of the long-term trends in the internet economy, please read our 2024 annual letter.
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
