The tender offer closed on February 24, and the number landed with the kind of thud that reverberates through Silicon Valley: $159 billion. That's Stripe's new valuation, a 74% surge in twelve months that puts the payments giant ahead of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in market worth. More valuable than most public companies anyone can name.
Yet when John Collison, the company's president and co-founder, sat down with CNBC that same day, he made one thing clear. An IPO? Not even in Stripe's "top 10 to 20" priorities right now. The Financial Times heard the same message. The Collison brothers—John and CEO Patrick—would rather talk about AI agents buying things and stablecoins settling cross-border payments than roadshow presentations and S-1 filings.
Which raises an obvious question: what does a $159 billion private company actually want?
The Long Road Back
Stripe's ascent to this valuation hasn't followed a straight line. Far from it.
Rewind to March 2021. The company peaked at $95 billion, buoyed by pandemic e-commerce mania and the assumption that every transaction would move online forever. Then reality intervened. By March 2023, Stripe raised $6.5 billion at a $50 billion valuation—a brutal 47% haircut meant mostly to give employees liquidity and cover looming tax bills.
Patrick Collison's November 2022 memo to staff didn't mince words. The company cut 14% of its workforce, roughly 1,000 people. In a letter posted to Stripe's public newsroom, Collison confessed to "two consequential mistakes": hiring for a world the founders wanted rather than the one they inhabited, and letting operating costs sprint ahead of revenue. Stripe ended 2022 with about 7,000 employees, a leaner operation by necessity.
The recovery took patience. A February 2024 tender valued Stripe at $65 billion. By February 2025, it had climbed to $91.5 billion. Now $159 billion. That's a threefold leap from the 2023 nadir in less than three years—powered, the Collisons insist, by what they're calling the "agentic commerce" era and a renewed conviction that crypto infrastructure matters.
The company announced the new valuation alongside its 2025 annual letter, disclosing that it processed $1.9 trillion in payment volume last year and remained "robustly profitable" for the second consecutive year. The tender offer itself attracted backing from Thrive Capital, Coatue, and Andreessen Horowitz, with Stripe also buying back some of its own shares to tighten control of the cap table.
But the valuation figure, impressive as it is, may be less revealing than what the Collisons chose to emphasize in their annual letter. Not growth metrics or unit economics. AI-powered commerce. Stablecoins.
Building the AI Foundation
Stripe's bet on artificial intelligence centers on something it unveiled at its 2025 Sessions conference: the first "Payments Foundation Model." The technology uses machine learning to optimize payment routing, automate dispute resolution, and predict fraud before it happens—all trained on years of transaction data flowing through Stripe's platform.
The NVIDIA partnership shows how seriously the company takes this. In October 2024, Stripe expanded its collaboration with the AI chipmaker, integrating fraud detection tools and offering prepaid access to NVIDIA's AI services through Stripe's billing infrastructure. NVIDIA, for its part, migrated its own subscriber billing to Stripe in what both companies described as the fastest enterprise migration in Stripe's history. Six weeks, start to finish.
Then there's Microsoft. In January 2026, Stripe announced "Copilot Checkout," a feature that lets merchants like Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie process transactions directly inside Microsoft's Copilot interface. Customers browse, select, and pay without ever leaving the chat window. Whether anyone actually wants to shop this way remains an open question, but Stripe is building the rails just in case.
The OpenAI collaboration goes even further. Stripe and OpenAI co-developed what they're calling the "Agentic Commerce Protocol" and launched "Instant Checkout" in ChatGPT in September 2025. The concept: autonomous AI agents that discover products, compare options, and complete purchases on behalf of users. Stripe handles the payment infrastructure and merchant relationships. OpenAI supplies the conversational layer.
Perhaps more than the founders expected, AI has become central to Stripe's identity. The company's Revenue Recognition and Usage-Based Billing suite is on track for a $1 billion annual recurring revenue run rate in 2026, according to its February announcement—much of it driven by SaaS companies using AI to scale rapidly and needing billing infrastructure that can keep pace.
The Crypto Reversal
Stripe's relationship with cryptocurrency has been... complicated.
The company supported Bitcoin payments briefly before abandoning crypto entirely in 2018, citing volatility and limited merchant demand. For years, the Collisons seemed content to let that chapter close. Then, in April 2024, Stripe abruptly reversed course, reintroducing support for USDC stablecoin transactions. The explanation: global businesses wanted faster, cheaper cross-border settlement, and stablecoins could deliver it.
The real tell came in February 2025. Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure startup, for $1.1 billion, according to CNBC. Bridge's technology lets businesses issue, custody, and move stablecoins programmatically—capabilities Stripe has now integrated into what it calls "stablecoin-powered financial accounts," available in 101 countries.
At its Tour NYC event in September 2025, Stripe introduced "Open Issuance," a toolkit that allows any business to launch and manage its own stablecoin. Shopify moved quickly, adding USDC payment acceptance across its merchant base in June 2025 through Stripe's infrastructure, rolling out to 34 countries.
There's also Tempo, a private blockchain for high-speed stablecoin payments that Stripe incubated alongside venture firm Paradigm. Though Tempo operates independently—it raised a $500 million Series A at a $5 billion valuation in October 2025—its existence signals Stripe's willingness to experiment with infrastructure that could, eventually, compete with traditional payment networks.
Not everyone is convinced. The Information reported in late 2025 that Stripe has navigated turbulence in its banking partnerships, moving away from Wells Fargo toward alternative rails. Advocacy groups opposed Stripe's effort to secure an OCC charter for Bridge National Trust, raising concerns about regulatory oversight. PYMNTS noted that Stripe's expanding stablecoin business will require meticulous sanctions screening and compliance work.
Still, the Collisons are pressing ahead.
The Numbers Game
Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025, up 34% year-over-year from $1.4 trillion in 2024. For context, that puts Stripe's annual flow within striking distance of Visa's global processed volume—though Stripe still operates at much smaller scale in terms of actual revenue.
The company takes a cut of most transactions: typically 2.9% plus $0.30 for U.S. online card payments, with additional fees for international cards and currency conversion. Over time, it's layered on fraud detection, invoicing, tax automation, capital advances, and card issuing alongside its core payment processing.
Today, Stripe counts 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80% of the Nasdaq 100 as customers. Alaska Airlines, Best Buy, Microsoft, Uber, Zara. NVIDIA, PepsiCo, OpenAI. The roster reads like a who's who of modern commerce.
And yes, the company is profitable. Stripe first hit that milestone in 2024 after years of spending to build out its sprawling product suite. It's stayed profitable since, though neither brother will disclose exact margins.
Why Stay Private?
At $159 billion, Stripe defies conventional wisdom. Most companies this large eventually go public, if only because employees and early investors demand liquidity. But Stripe has provided regular tender offers dating back to February 2024, when the valuation stood at $65 billion. The latest tender gives employees another chance to cash out while Stripe and its backers—Thrive Capital, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, plus earlier investors like Baillie Gifford, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Sequoia, and Singapore's GIC and Temasek—repurchase shares and maintain control.
The calculus seems straightforward. Why endure quarterly earnings calls, activist investors, and short-term thinking when you can operate on your own timeline? Patrick Collison joined Meta's board in April 2025, a role that likely offers perspective on both the benefits and burdens of public-company life. John continues to evangelize stablecoins and agentic commerce in interviews, often sidestepping IPO questions entirely.
Stripe's workforce, meanwhile, remains deliberately lean. After the November 2022 cuts, the company trimmed another 300 roles in January 2025—about 3.5% of staff, primarily in product, engineering, and operations. Stripe has said it plans to reach around 10,000 employees by the end of 2025, a measured expansion from the roughly 7,000 it retained after the 2022 reset. That's still well below the bloat of 2021-2022.
The Unanswered Question
For now, Stripe seems content to let its valuation climb in private markets, provide employee liquidity as needed, and chase the opportunities it believes will define the next decade of internet commerce. AI agents that shop. Stablecoins that settle. Infrastructure that powers transactions most people will never see.
Whether those bets justify $159 billion is a question that won't be answered in quarterly earnings reports or analyst calls. And that, perhaps, is exactly how the Collisons want it. They're building for a world that doesn't exist yet, funding it with profits from the world that does. The rest of us will find out if they're right on their timeline, not Wall Street's.
