Stripe valuation soars to $159bn in latest share sale – Financial Times

Stripe’s valuation has soared by more than 70 per cent to $159bn in the past year as the payments company agreed its latest employee share sale in a move that will allow it to remain private for longer.

The deal alleviates the pressure on the 15-year-old Irish-American group to seek a public listing as it allows employees to cash in on their holdings.

Stripe said it was focused on the “inflection point” brought about by AI and the growth of stablecoins rather than on a stock market listing.

“A big capital markets transaction like [an IPO] is not in our top 10 or 20 list of priorities,” said president John Collison, who co-founded Stripe with his brother Patrick.

Investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue and Andreessen Horowitz agreed to buy shares from former and current employees in the latest tender offer while Stripe also used its own capital to purchase some stock.

Stripe announced its new valuation, up from $92bn 12 months ago, on Tuesday alongside its annual letter. It had processed $1.9tn in payments in 2025 — a 34 per cent increase from the previous year.

It was boosted by a new cohort of start-ups riding the AI wave, as well as titans such as Nvidia and Microsoft. The company said it had been profitable for the second consecutive year.

More than half of the new companies that signed with Stripe last year were based outside the US, reflecting the rise of new AI tools that are making it easier to establish new software ventures. Stripe also said new fintechs were more global than their predecessors thanks to the “borderlessness” of digital assets.

Stripe made a relatively early bet on stablecoins — cash-like digital tokens typically pegged to the dollar — when it bought stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1bn in 2024.

The gamble paid off after the US regulated stablecoins with the Genius Act last year in a move that helped to boost volumes. Payment volumes at Bridge more than quadrupled last year, Stripe said.

Stripe, which has a base in Dublin, urged the EU not to fall behind on stablecoins. European lawmakers are looking to push a digital euro over stablecoins, which are often backed by US dollars.

Collison said: “When people talk about stablecoins, they often mean dollar-denominated stablecoins . . . we are seeing that being used for remittances or for people creating new kinds of fintech applications. It’s important that Europe not miss out there.”

Collison also said he expected consumers to adopt “agentic payments” made by AI agents on their behalf in the coming years, particularly for “low stakes” payments such as asking a chatbot to source missing ingredients for recipes.

“We think consumer adoption will happen very, very quickly because again, no one likes clicking through all the web forms to buy things . . . They like buying things. They like shopping, but they don’t like filling out web forms.”