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Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo agoLudicrous valuation
- s_dev 8mo agoIt would help a lot if you elaborated why it's a 'ludicrous' valuation rather than asserting that it simply is. What method are you using to value the enterprise and why does your expected result not match the actual result?
- fourseventy 8mo agoIt's insane that they aren't public yet. Their investors must be pressuring them like crazy to IPO.
- rf15 8mo agoWhy ask for IPO to dillute the effective investor pool if you are already making a ton of money consistently?
- fourseventy 8mo agoTo give liquidity to investors.
- Cyph0n 8mo agoDon’t they already get to participate in secondary markets to liquidate?
- onion2k 8mo agoThe cost of that liquidity is missing out on realizing future growth though. It's fairly safe to assume that as there isn't an IPO yet the investors want to hold rather than cash in returns. They probably believe there's more growth potential, and that the board are the right people to deliver it.
- KK7NIL 8mo ago> The cost of that liquidity is missing out on realizing future growth though. Why would it be? I don't believe an IPO has to be dilutive, it can be done with already issued shares. I grant you that's not usually how they're done though.
- 303space 8mo agoIf you bought Stripe at a 95b valuation in 2021 your returns are barely keeping up with the SP500 after this latest round. Not exactly an elite capital growth machine.
- j45 8mo agoPerhaps infrastructure has a different kind of long term upside.
- YetAnotherNick 8mo agoYou forgot to mention its valuation grew by 2.6x in the previous 3 months. 2021 was different thing altogether with the money printing.
- skybrian 8mo agoEven for good investments, investors will want to sell at some point rather than owning an investment forever, if only to diversify.
- onion2k 8mo agoSure, at some point. Maybe that isn't now though.
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- ndr 8mo agoWill they ever have to go public? I imagine there's a way they can buy everything back.
- mercwear 8mo agoI hope they hold off - going public tends to kill innovation and replace it with bureaucracy
- anovikov 8mo agoAlmost as if there's a lot to innovate in a "dumb pipe" a payment processor naturally is.
- jacquesm 8mo agoAt scale, payment processors are amongst the most difficult things you could do because every two bit crook out there is going to try to scam you somehow.
- dewey 8mo agoCan probably build it in a weekend.
- malfist 8mo agoYou let me know when VISA lets you colocate into their rack for processing payments with your built in a weekend vibe coded project.
- dewey 8mo agoI guess I should've added "/s" :P
- pestaa 8mo agodewey was joking.
- elictronic 8mo agoManagement reading a thread like this need the /s.
- 8mo ago
- jameson 8mo agoEverything's public appearance until S1 is filed
- baxtr 8mo agoIt’s sad. Public companies allow the rest of us to participate in a success story like this. Until IPO it’s only a selected group of affluent people who have access to these private companies.
- cwbrandsma 8mo agoIPOs also kill a lot of companies. Now you have a new list of investors you are obligated to attend to, and what those investors what is not always to make your company more successful, if it can make more money now.
- kibwen 8mo agoNot just the IPO. Being public at all subjects you to the perverse and destructive incentive of needing to maximize shareholder value. Just because some private companies take VC funding (and subject themselves to analogous forces) doesn't mean that's required or expected.
- gmd63 8mo agoNeeding to maximize shareholder value is a myth. There is no law that requires you to do that - people like to use the idea as an excuse to do scummy business.
- malfist 8mo agoSure, it's a dubious legal requirement at best. But you try telling people that on an earnings call and watch your valuation plummet because you took a long position and the market wanted a next quarter position. And even if you don't care about selling your stock personally, it does impact your ability to raise funds.
- elictronic 8mo agoShort term investors don’t matter. They are going to pull out and move to the next thing.
- gamblor956 8mo agoCompanies that keep delaying going public generally do so to keep hidden unfavorable data. Private companies can say whatever they want about their performance as long as they don't lie to their own investors; public companies can't.
- darth_avocado 8mo agoYou don’t have to go public at all. If you’re profitable and your investors don’t want an exit, then you can stay private in perpetuity. Epic is a great example of that.
- jameskilton 8mo agoStripe has been doing annual tender offers. Their stance on not being public yet is that they don't need to be, as an IPO is mainly a way to raise money. As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
- adventured 8mo agoAn IPO today is mainly a way for major investors - those that want out - to liquidate out in a big way by dumping to a very large mass of investors. There is no other means to do that without signaling a gigantic loss of confidence. Raising money as a private entity is trivial these days if you're in the league that Stripe is. See: the comical AI private funding levels.
- hypeatei 8mo ago> An IPO today is mainly a way for major investors Major investors and insiders. Stay the hell away from IPOs if you're not an institution getting access to shares at a reasonable price.
- armadyl 8mo ago> As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually. This is an incredibly odd sentiment, imo. What’s the desire to see them go public unless you personally are profiting from it? Going public would quickly set Stripe on a pathway to potential enshittification and at minimum starting to squeeze the consumers and businesses it provides services to more.
- paxys 8mo agoIf they are ex-Stripe they are likely holding shares, and so yes they would personally profit from going public.
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- mattas 8mo agoI wonder if there will be a class of VC that intends to provide LPs with income in addition to capital appreciation. If it doesn't make sense to go public, then focus on cash flow and kick of steady income to investors.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- stefan_ 8mo agoMight be too late already, seeing how we are well past "peak SaaS" (and frankly Stripe have slowed down and lost a lot of the glitter in years past).
- paxys 8mo agoInvestors can pressure you when you are worth single digit or low double digit billions. At $100B+ you are calling the shots, and if investors aren't happy they can sell their shares in the next tender offer.
- cmiles8 8mo agoThe markets are skeptical at the moment. A bunch of tech IPOs in the last few years have tanked 70+% since the IPO and that can be devastating to a company. Also there’s a ton of overhead associated with being public that nobody really wants to do so companies now stay private as long as they can get away with.
- pewpewp 8mo agoHow do you ruin a good company? Simple. Go public
- StopDisinfo910 8mo agoThe cynic in me thinks they don't want to crash their valuation.
- doctorpangloss 8mo agowhy do you figure? in some sectors, IPOs were literally 10x larger in 2023 than 2016, but i am not sure specifically about fintech. ask pitchbook. that increases IRR by a whole +1.4, just by waiting.
- colesantiago 8mo agoPrivate markets is where the wealth is (if you invested at the bottom), as soon as Stripe goes public you're getting dumped on. Unfortunately you need to be an accredited investor to access these markets. This is the real gatekeeping here as rich pop stars, actors, sports stars and musicians who aren't versed in tech has more access to investing in these private companies than the academics, students in europe creating the algorithms that power them. An 11 year old can inherit $100 million and be more "accredited" than you, even though they (may) have no knowledge of the industry, no investing experience and no years of industry experience. Even if you have knowledge in the tech scene and you know which companies are going to go big in the future, unless you're ultra rich already to qualify as accredited, you're shut out early on.
- triceratops 8mo agoSomething like 20% of American households meet the accredited standard. It isn't some ultra-elite bar. Stripe being able to find all the capital they need in private markets is the actual indicator of wealth disparity.
- tptacek 8mo agoNot to mention: Stripe doesn't want your money, whether or not you're accredited.
- colesantiago 8mo ago"Private markets is where the wealth is (if you invested at the bottom)" Stripe might not need your money now, but they certainly needed it at the pre-seed, seed stage where if you were an angel/seed investor you would have been able to participate.
- tptacek 8mo agoNo they didn't. They were picky at the seed stage. They were picky in their first priced round. They were picky in every subsequent round. There was never a point where they wanted your money. The most promising companies fight off investors when word gets around they're raising. There is never a point in the lifecycle of any of these companies where they wanted random retail investors with no network on their cap tables. The kinds of companies that do want those investors tend, for clear reasons, not to be the kind you want to invest in. You don't want accreditation rules relaxed or eliminated. You simply want Stripe to be a public company instead of a private one. Fair enough, but Stripe doesn't want to be a public company.
- aliljet 8mo agoThe public can absolutely participate in this by way of syndication deals. Those syndicates are what's covering up the true extent of ownership and they're essentially charging for access with their fees. It's oddly shady, poorly regulated, and more expensive than just being public, but everyone can ride this ride.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoHow exactly?
- aliljet 8mo agoThe easiest way? Angelist.
- notpushkin 8mo agoI’ve poked around – looks like it’s not enough to just declare you’re an accredited investor, but also prove it? What evidence do I need to provide as a US investor: https://help.angellist.com/hc/en-us/articles/15569926884109-What-evidence-do-I-need-to-provide-to-prove-that-I-am-accredited-as-a-US-individual-investor https://help.angellist.com/hc/en-us/articles/15569926884109-... As a non-US investor: https://help.angellist.com/hc/en-us/articles/15570114297869-What-evidence-do-I-need-to-provide-to-prove-that-I-am-accredited-as-a-non-US-individual-investor https://help.angellist.com/hc/en-us/articles/15570114297869-...
- Sherl 8mo agoRobinhood just launched a new ventures vehicle and Stripe could be "supposedly" part of it. Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI),
- myvoiceismypass 8mo agoThank you for sharing this, I was unaware! It launches tomorrow. This is the footnote regarding Stripe: "New deal incoming: RVI has entered a binding agreement to invest in Stripe, Inc. This investment is expected to close after RVI’s IPO, subject to meeting customary closing conditions. Note: This deal isn’t guaranteed to close."
- throwaw12 8mo agoCongratulations. But how is it 5x bigger than Adyen, which had 2.3B revenue and 1B earnings in 2025?
- malfist 8mo agoAccording to wikipedia, Stripe had a revenue of 5.1B in 2024.
- troupo 8mo agoRevenue is not profit. All we know about Stripe is that it's "robustly profitable": https://assets.stripeassets.com/fzn2n1nzq965/3LlGw839Q6kUwxZlLZDtH6/27b629a395aca7219c34c6db5ada3d79/Stripe-annual-letter-2025-desktop.pdf https://assets.stripeassets.com/fzn2n1nzq965/3LlGw839Q6kUwxZ... Adyen reported 500 million EUR in pure profit: https://investors.adyen.com/financials/h2-2025-4r9rc https://investors.adyen.com/financials/h2-2025-4r9rc
- fastball 8mo agoIt is not 5x bigger, it is 5x more valuable. Obviously Stripes 2x higher revenue is part of that equation, but not all of it.
- sej1 8mo agoAlso Adyen's processing volume grew just 8% (to $1.6T usd) in 2025, while Stripe's grew 34% (to $1.9T usd). Stripe's bigger _and_ growing faster.
- throwaw12 8mo agoyeah, my bad, wanted to say more valuable
- shimman 8mo ago5x more valuable in a private market is meaningless, until they go public it's all magic numbers used to push whatever narrative they need.
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- shevy-java 8mo ago> Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume I think we hackers in general also need to have a value assigned. Even open source authors generate real value but right now I see an imbalance as to who makes money and who does not. I'd even almost go as far as say that taxes (a state gathers) should go to a certain percentage value back to the open source community. There are a lot of details missing here, of course, but from a core view this only seems fair. I'l also never forget Bill Gates anti-open source letter. That should instantly yield a 99.999% extra tax on him.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ericmay 8mo agoWell when you're giving away your product for free... maybe open-source maintainers who want payment for their "free" products should consider going to business school? I'm in favor of funding the arts, for example, but I'm not sure open-source is something we should tax/fund for. There is real business value in the projects that are created, but open-source maintainers insist on "giving them away for free". Start charging and then we don't need to fund/tax.
- gmd63 8mo agoWe have a bunch of socially minded people providing free value in the form of open source that enjoy the gift they are giving to others. When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations - who employ people to search for exploits, without fixing them, to suck up as much wealth as possible - I'm not surprised they would want to take a step back and ask for a share of that. And that's totally fine under the same market mechanics you're recommending. If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them.
- ericmay 8mo ago> If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them. That's exactly what I want. If you want to give your product away for free, that's great! You're a better person for doing so. If you want to sell it, that's great too! You should be rewarded and compensated for building great stuff just like anyone else is. But what I do not want to see as a citizen and taxpayer is "we want to build this for free, ope now we want to get paid and it's totally not fair that Meta took our free thing and did something productive with it and we need taxpayer dollars.". That's not fair to anyone, and solving that by "mandating" or "requiring" things is anti-free market, and against the free spirit of human creativity and entrepreneurship. > When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations Let's not call it all charity though. You get invited to conferences, you get job opportunities you otherwise wouldn't get, you get to feel great about the thing you are working on - there's a lot of unpaid benefits, and under-the-table ones too.
- rprend 8mo ago1.6 percent of global GDP blows my mind.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jez 8mo agoFor comparison, Visa's stated FY 2025 (ended Sep 30, 2025) payments volume was $14.2T. rough math, but: $14.2T / $1.9T * 1.6% = 12% global GDP
- rprend 8mo agoI was curious, and the American Clearing House has a TPV of $93 trillion, which means ACH is 78%?? That seems too high. Oh - not all bank transfers count in GDP. I often move money from one account to another. Note that Visa has the same issue: withdrawing money from an ATM shouldn’t count towards GDP! Neither does Vemo-ing a friend to settle up a split restaurant bill (my Venmo is attached to my debit card).
- reactordev 8mo agoAt least it’s not 24.9% Americans and credit have an unhealthy relationship.
- oliyoung 8mo agoNot all VISA or Mastercard transactions are credit backed, I'd argue that the large majority aren't anymore they're more commonly debit VISA/Mastercard
- hwhehwhehegwggw 8mo agoWhy will a number blow your mind? Have you thought about how Universe exists from nothing?
- rprend 8mo ago
- miohtama 8mo agoWeak. They should pivot to AI.
- gjgtcbkj 8mo ago[flagged]
- hmokiguess 8mo agoI remember when Stripe started and it was super fun to set it up as a developer and build stuff. Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)
- krainboltgreene 8mo agoYou can't really do better than stripe. The onboarding overhead is because of fraud and the costs are basically barely above interchange.
- MichaelZuo 8mo agoStripe needs all that byzantine fraud prevention, on top of what they had a decade ago, because they are a huge concentrated target. A smaller firm could be way simpler. Because they simply wouldnt have enough money to provide a decent payday for dozens of malicious geniuses going at them 24/7/365.
- woodruffw 8mo agoIs this true? I would expect most of Stripe's fraud overhead to be statutory in nature, not something they hire for because they're a concentrated target. (They certainly have more staff because more volume, but the actual regulatory requirements I'd expect to be roughly the same for the service they provide.)
- the_bear 8mo agoWhen we used Stripe, we opted out of all their fraud prevention stuff to save money (not sure if that's still an option). As a b2b SaaS where payment happens after a free trial (not at signup), we're just not a target for fraud, so it was totally fine. I can't speak to why Stripe's fraud protection is so expensive. Is it because they're a target? Or maybe because they realized people will pay for it (it seems valuable for something like ecommerce)? I dunno, but I can confidently say that as of ~5 years ago, it wasn't required by any regulation, and my business was perfectly fine without it. Now we use Paddle, and they also try to sell us a bunch of stuff we don't need at ridiculous prices. We're just using them because we wanted a merchant of record (where they handle taxes and stuff), but no, I'm not going to pay a % of my revenue for basic dunning emails, fraud prevention, vague "optimizations" that "increase conversions" (lol no they don't), etc.
- purple_ferret 8mo agoBraintree had $1.53 trillion TPV in 2023[0], and it's just a subsidiary of Paypal which has tanked to $40 billion market cap despite revenue and profit that are probably lightyears ahead of Stripe. Honestly, I wouldn't touch Stripe with a ten foot poll at this valuation. Fintech is an industry that just disappoints in the end. [0]https://www.paypal.com/us/braintree https://www.paypal.com/us/braintree
- boringg 8mo agoI don't know you have paypal and stripe in the same sentence. Paypal is not a great service at all.
- jez 8mo agoPaypal TPV YoY growth for 2025 was 7%[1]. Stripe cites 34% growth for the same period and metric. [1]: https://s205.q4cdn.com/875401827/files/doc_financials/2025/q4/PYPL-4Q-25-Earnings-Presentation.pdf#page=9 https://s205.q4cdn.com/875401827/files/doc_financials/2025/q...
- christkv 8mo agoThats not bad for a mature business like paypal
- valzam 8mo agoI mean it's not like Stripe was founded yesterday. Stripe: 2010 Paypal: 1998 I'd argue that 99% of the "internet gdp" happened after Stripe was founded
- skinnymuch 8mo agoI’m not the most well versed but isn’t that still insane to be 4x valuation of PayPal? Maybe it’s more PayPal valuation being crap vs Stripe being too high. Adyen is close to PayPal with a PE of 30 (vs PayPal’s sub-10) and Adyen like PayPal is close to being back to its IPO level. PayPal seems crazy when it has acquired businesses like Honey (probably hasn’t helped) and Braintree/Venmo since then. Pretty funny PayPal was spun off as the better growth stock but eBay has tripled since then and their market caps are the same now.
- jppope 8mo agoSounds like an IPO in 6-18 months.
- testfoobar 8mo agoThis feels rich. Compare: Adyen: $29.408B right now at Yahoo Finance. PayPal: $41.51B right now. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADYEN.AS/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADYEN.AS/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PYPL/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PYPL/
- 0xy 8mo agoPayPal is steadily decreasing in share of web payments, with the one redeeming part of their business being Venmo, which appears to be crushing Cash App. Adyen competes primarily on price with no feature differentiation, and doesn't have the same ease-of-use. Working at several large companies in payments areas who were Stripe customers, I'll sum up what the competition looks like by paraphrasing one of the executives I reported to: "we go to Adyen when we want to take a competing offer to Stripe for them to match".
- mschild 8mo agoThis is purely speculation on my end but paypal has too much friction from a consumer standpoint for me. I pay mostly with credit card (debit really but entering the number etc). When paying with PayPal, I need to click through several screens to even be able to enter my details. They almost always show a login screen, then I have to find the small text at the bottom that says I dont want one. Then by default they want my SEPA details, which Im not going to give them, before allowing me to select Credit Card. Even then I still have to double check that the "Create PayPal Account" checkbox is unchecked before paying. Stripe immediately shows you a form and doesn't ask any questions.
- hibikir 8mo agoIt does seem like a lot, but if you look at growth rates, the differences are significant. Stripe is also doing far more value-added stuff: If all you need is to process credit card Adyen is probably going to outbid Stripe. They almost always did last time I checked. But Stripe is offering a significantly larger product, especially to people running marketplaces. That was always the selling point for the doordashes and deliveroos of the world. Even for Amazon. So I bet that the skinny version that is just a payment processor would be worth a lot less. They aren't the only ones trying to widen their horizons either: Paypal and Square/Block came up with plenty of plans to try to grow past boring payments. They just didn't execute on those things all that well, and somehow Stripe does.
- MoonWalk 8mo agoAnother leech piggybacking on the bloated corpus of the greatest leeches in all of consumerdom: credit-card companies. Disgusting rip-off of consumers, yes, but even worse is the rip-off of merchants.
- syedkarim 8mo agoVisa is valued at $585B and Mastercard is valued at $444B. Is Stripe making more revenue per transaction than Visa and Mastercard?
- notpushkin 8mo agoI would be surprised if Stripe has made less per transaction. Visa and Mastercard make way more transactions though.
- zipy124 8mo agovaluation's are based on future returns, not current returns. If one believes they are growing and visa and mastercard aren't then the valuation might make a little more sense. (though I can't comment on the actualities, only the potentials).
- rprend 8mo agoYes. Stripe’s 2.9% fee minus interchange (interchange is variable, on average 1.9%) is higher than Mastercard or Visa’s take of .14%. But it’s not so simple, because Stripe faces liability for merchant fraud. If you are high volume you negotiate IC+, where the plus is .1%-.4%. The valuations price in expected growth as well as unit economics. Mastercard doesn’t have as much room to grow because cards already saturate consumer payments.
- fergie 8mo agoIs it OK that these firms aren't public?
- jongjong 8mo agoI cannot comprehend why there are so few companies dominating the payments sector. It doesn't seem competitive. Anyone can build a payment processor, nobody can get regulatory approval. I also don't understand the fear around SaaS recently... People believe some weird narrative about AI replacing SaaS apps... Oh boy, people actually think that building the thing is the hard part. The entire software industry is pure crony-play; the people who run the big corporations own shares of their SaaS providers so they have no incentive to cut those contracts. Same with payment processors. I can't believe people still think we have a free market. You can point to any company that's successful and there will be conflicts of interest all over the place. It doesn't even matter what the company does TBH. It's irrelevant. People are just competing on who can make the money move around in circles within their group the fastest. Money certainly seems a lot more abundant when it passes through many hands and people are just buying stuff from each other.
- alexmorley 8mo ago> "anyone can build a payment processor, nobody can get regulatory approval." If you want to become a bank regulatory approval is hard. If you don't then its necessary but not the biggest barrier by far. Building trust with card networks, merchants & banks, interfacing with card networks, optimizing acceptance rates to a high level against the black box of card networks etc. And then you still wouldn't make any money because the margins are extremely low on processing payments themselves - so either you have to have massive scale or have a bunch of value added services that you charge more for. For which you also need a serious commercial engine to be able to sell to either loads of enterprises or some very large ones (who will rarely sign exclusive deals - they will just give you a share of wallet so they can transfer traffic over at will). Card networks are another story...
- DaedalusII 8mo agogood question i list for you the main problems with entering this space: criminal liability for mistakes (AML rules), you have to manage fraud, the banks which are your custody providers will constantly try and shut you down, clients expect your service on day one to be equal to mastercard, your margins are almost nothing, it is one of the most competitive industries in the world, you need to go through central bank regulations/SEC equivalent every time you enter a new market, governments in countries like Vietnam or Bangladesh or China are actively hostile to your business model, and it is HYPER competitive. anything you do well, stripe/airwallex/etc will clone immediately Airwallex is one of the most powerful stripe competitors and the CEO is a psychopath that seems like a tv parody of a silicon valley CEO. he has to be though because so many governments, banks, competitors etc are trying to crush him constantly. note that stripe differentiates itself heavily on checkout technology, basically making the experience of paying for things easier for the consumer.
- dzonga 8mo agostripe has done a lot of impressive work in terms of opening up commerce on the internet. however as a comparison -- how much JP Morgan payments would be valued if a separate entity ?