Stripe reached a $159 billion valuation through a tender offer for current and former employees, a number that puts the private payments giant within reach of acquiring PayPal.

Bloomberg first reported Stripe's interest in acquiring all or part of PayPal, whose market capitalization sits at roughly $43 billion.

The tender offer is backed by investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue and a16z, with Stripe also using a portion of its own capital to repurchase shares. President John Collison told CNBC Tuesday that the company has no immediate plans to go public. 

"For us right now, an IPO would be a solution in search of a problem," he said, adding that going public isn't "one of our top five or ten or twenty priorities."

Stripe's ascent

In a press release, Stripe cofounders Patrick and John Collison painted a picture of a company with scale and a strong financial footing. The company powers 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 80% of the Nasdaq 100, and remains "robustly profitable," they said.

In its annual letter, the company said businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025, up 34% from the year prior, while its revenue suite is on track to hit an annual run rate of $1 billion this year.

The company also reported that businesses joining Stripe in 2025 are scaling faster than ever, with the newest cohort growing around 50% faster than the 2024 cohort and twice as many reaching $10 million in annual recurring revenue within three months of launch.

Those new businesses are increasingly global from the outset. In its letter, Stripe noted that AI companies like ChatGPT, Claude, Replit and Cursor have launched globally by default, unlike earlier tech generations that expanded country by country.

More than half (57%) of companies that joined Stripe in 2025 were based outside the U.S., a shift the company says reflects a broader trend of internet businesses treating the entire web as their domestic market, the report said.

A bet on agents and stablecoins

Stripe is embedding itself in agentic commerce, rolling out a suite of tools that let businesses sell across multiple AI interfaces with a single integration. The company partnered with OpenAI to develop the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard for transactions between AI platforms and businesses, and is powering the first shopping experiences inside ChatGPT. It’s also working with Microsoft to bring similar capabilities to Copilot.

Agentic commerce “has the potential to be generationally impactful, the letter said. “As with the early internet, the future success of agentic commerce is contingent on universal interoperability.”

Stripe is also deepening its push into stablecoins. Stablecoin payment volume doubled to just under $400 billion in 2025 even as Bitcoin's price dropped sharply, with 60% estimated to represent B2B payments. Bridge, the stablecoin platform Stripe acquired last year, saw its own volume more than quadruple.

“Stablecoin payments are advancing quietly and inexorably as real-world uptake continues apace,” according to the company. 

The company’s momentum is drawing validation from investors.

"Stripe has consistently aligned itself with the most important technology shifts — first ecommerce and software-as-a-service, and now agents and stablecoins — and has set a relentless pace of innovation for fifteen years and counting,” Alex Immerman, general partner at a16z, said in a statement.