Irish-founded fintech Stripe has been valued at more than $159 billion (€135bn) following a tender offer that allowed employees to sell shares without going public.
The company said it had signed agreements with investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue, a16z and others to provide the majority of the capital for the tender offer, but it would also use some of its own money to repurchase shares.
News of the tender offer was first reported earlier this month by Axios, with a speculative value of $140 billion.
Stripe’s valuation has climbed in the past year, jumping more than $30 billion from the $107 billion it was valued at in September last year.
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In a regular update letter, the company said revenue generated by businesses on its platform rose more than a third last year, reaching $1.9 trillion. That is equivalent to roughly 1.6 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP).
“All in all, 2025 was a strong year for the internet economy, and we’re delighted to see so many of Stripe’s customers do so well,” the company said in the update.
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Stripe, which was cofounded by brothers Patrick and John Collison in 2010, has built an extensive payments infrastructure for companies that covers functions such as billing and subscription management, tax compliance, fraud prevention, embedded finance and global treasury management. Its Stripe Link payments platform is used by more than 200 million people.
Stripe currently supports more than five million businesses, either directly or via platforms, including the industry’s top artificial intelligence (AI) companies, some of the largest blue-chip companies, big tech firms and startups.
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The company said more than half of the new companies joining Stripe in 2025 were based outside the US.
Stripe said it “remained robustly profitable”, without giving specific figures, and said it had continued to invest heavily in product development and acquisitions.
“Since our last update, we acquired Privy, which powers more than 110 million programmable wallets, and Metronome, which powers the complex usage-based billing models used by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Confluent, and Nvidia,” Stripe said.
The company has turned its attention to stablecoins – a type of cryptocurrency that is pegged to the value of a currency such as the US dollar – and agentic AI in commerce. Agenitc AI is an autonomous system that can think, plan, and take real-world actions. It acquired Bridge in 2025 and expanded the integration of stablecoins into Stripe’s platform in recent months. The company said it was now looking at blockchain, with the launch of a blockchain purpose-built for payments in September.
“In our view, agents will most likely soon be responsible for most internet transactions, and we will likely need blockchains that support more than one million – or even one billion – transactions per second,” the company said.
Agentic commerce has been “overhyped” in some corners, the company said, but it had the potential to be “generationally impactful”.
“There’s no forecasting exactly where agentic commerce will be by the end of 2026, but it’s clear we’ve already moved well beyond pure hype into a phase of building and real-world experimentation. And the pace of change will likely only accelerate from here.”
