Programmable financial infrastructure for the internet economy
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States (co-headquartered in Dublin, Ireland) | Founded: 2010 | Employees: Not disclosed; roughly 8,000+ employees based on public reporting (estimate) | Stage: Private; $159B valuation in the February 2026 employee tender offer; profitable since 2024; no IPO announced | Website: https://stripe.com
Stripe was founded in 2010 by Patrick and John Collison, who had already sold a company and wanted to fix the miserable experience of accepting payments online. The insight was that developers, not banks, should control the integration: seven lines of code, a clean API and transparent pricing, with Stripe handling the acquiring, risk and settlement plumbing behind it. That developer-first approach spread through startups, then through platforms such as Shopify and Salesforce, and eventually into large enterprises. Stripe expanded from card payments into Billing, Connect, Radar, Treasury, Capital, Issuing, Tax, Atlas, Terminal, Identity and Climate, each of which is a business that rides on the same merchant relationship and data.
Stripe's scale is now macroeconomic. Businesses on the platform generated $1.9 trillion of volume in 2025, up 34%, equivalent to about 1.6% of global GDP, and the 2025 cohort of new businesses grew roughly 50% faster than the 2024 cohort. More than half of new businesses joining Stripe are outside the United States, and 30% of international revenue at globally minded Stripe businesses comes from countries that are neither the home market nor a top-10 economy. Stripe Atlas incorporated a quarter of all Delaware corporations, and 20% of Atlas startups charged their first customer within 30 days, up from 8% in 2020. The customer list spans OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Lovable, Vercel, Midjourney and Amazon on the AI side, plus blue-chip incumbents such as Ford, Marriott, BMW, Maersk and Salesforce.
The financial story turned in 2024 when Stripe became profitable, and 2025 extended it. The company does not publish audited revenue, but its annual letter said it remained robustly profitable while investing heavily in product and acquisitions; third-party estimates put 2025 net revenue at roughly $5.8B-$6.9B. The Revenue suite is the fastest-growing software line, on track for a $1B annual run rate in 2026. Stablecoin payments volume doubled to about $400B in 2025, 60% of which is estimated to be B2B, and Bridge's volume more than quadrupled after the $1.1B acquisition. In July 2025 Stripe bought Privy, whose programmable wallets are used by more than 110 million accounts; in September 2025 it announced Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain built with Paradigm.
The current chapter is agentic commerce. Stripe worked with OpenAI on the Agentic Commerce Protocol, launched an Agentic Commerce Suite, introduced Shared Payment Tokens that let agents pay without seeing card credentials, and added machine payments so developers can charge agents for API calls, MCP usage and HTTP requests in stablecoin micropayments. It is also powering the first shopping experiences inside ChatGPT and collaborating with Microsoft on Copilot. The strategic logic is that if AI assistants become the interface through which people buy things, the payments layer has to be programmable, tokenized and interoperable, and Stripe intends to be the neutral infrastructure underneath every agent and every merchant rather than a single platform's checkout.
Stripe has raised roughly $9.4B of equity across its history and has repeatedly used tender offers to give employees liquidity instead of going public. It raised $6.5B in a 2023 down round at a $50B valuation, recovered to $65B in early 2024, $91.5B in February 2025 and $159B in February 2026. The company is co-headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, with a large engineering presence in Dublin and offices around the world, and it remains founder-led, with Patrick Collison as CEO and John Collison as President.
Stripe has become the closest thing the internet has to a default financial operating system. More than 5 million businesses use it directly or through platforms, including 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 80% of the Nasdaq 100, all of the largest AI labs and a quarter of new Delaware corporations, which are incorporated through Stripe Atlas. In 2025 those businesses processed $1.9 trillion of volume, up 34% year over year, while Stripe remained robustly profitable and shipped more than 350 product updates. The February 2026 tender at a $159B valuation, up 74% from $91.5B a year earlier, made it the most valuable private fintech in the world without a single public shareholder.
The growth engine is no longer just card payments. The Revenue suite, which bundles Billing, Invoicing, Tax and related automation, is on track to hit a $1B annual run rate in 2026, roughly double its run rate a year earlier. Stablecoins went from a side experiment to a strategic pillar: stablecoin payment volume doubled to about $400B in 2025, 60% of it B2B, and Bridge, the orchestration platform Stripe bought for $1.1B, more than quadrupled its volume. Stripe followed that with Privy, whose wallet infrastructure reaches more than 110 million programmable wallets, and Tempo, a payments-specific blockchain incubated with Paradigm. The company is deliberately building the settlement layer, the wallet layer and the application layer at once.
The most important strategic bet is agentic commerce. Stripe and OpenAI co-developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard for AI agents to transact with merchants, and Stripe launched an Agentic Commerce Suite that lets brands sell across multiple AI interfaces from one integration. Shared Payment Tokens let agents initiate payments without exposing credentials, and machine payments let developers charge agents for API calls, MCP usage and HTTP requests using stablecoin micropayments. If agents become a meaningful share of shopping traffic, Stripe wants to own the checkout, the identity and the settlement rails underneath them.
The risks are concentration and regulatory surface. Stripe's revenue is tied to the health of internet commerce and to a relatively small number of very large platform customers; a downturn in consumer spending or a shift in how platforms route payments would show up quickly. It operates under money-transmission and e-money rules in dozens of jurisdictions, and stablecoins add a moving regulatory target even after the U.S. GENIUS Act. Adyen, PayPal, Block, Checkout.com and Shopify Payments all compete for the same merchants, and AI-native commerce could let platforms disintermediate traditional payment providers. The bull case is that Stripe keeps compounding as the tax, billing and money-movement layer for every new software company; the bear case is that its $159B mark already prices in a decade of that outcome while the IPO window stays shut.
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