Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
Source: Hacker News
Highlights
- Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34 % from 2024 – roughly 1.6 % of global GDP.
- Beyond payments, Stripe’s Revenue suite is on track to hit an annual run rate of $1 billion this year.
- Stripe powers 90 % of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80 % of the Nasdaq 100. The 2025 cohort of companies that joined Stripe is the highest‑performing yet.
Tender Offer & Valuation
SAN FRANCISCO AND DUBLIN – Stripe, the programmable financial‑services company, has signed agreements with investors to provide liquidity to current and former Stripe employees through a tender offer at a $159 B (€135 B) valuation.
- The majority of funds for the tender offer are being provided by investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue, a16z, and others.
- Stripe will also use a portion of its own capital to repurchase shares.
2025 Annual Letter
Stripe published its 2025 annual letter to the Stripe community, detailing a strong year for businesses on Stripe and the internet economy overall. Highlights include:
- $1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34 % from 2024 (≈ 1.6 % of global GDP).
- Revenue suite (Stripe Billing, Invoicing, Tax, and more) on track for a $1 billion annual run rate.
“Our programmable financial services now power more than 5 million businesses directly or via platforms, including all of the top AI companies, many of the largest blue‑chip companies (90 % of the Dow Jones Industrial Average), most of the biggest tech companies (80 % of the Nasdaq 100), and a significant fraction of freshly minted startups (25 % of all Delaware corporations are now created with Stripe Atlas).
Stripe remained robustly profitable, allowing us to continue investing heavily in product development (with more than 350 product updates last year) as well as acquisitions. … 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.”
— Patrick and John Collison, co‑founders
“After a decade of partnership and seeing their work up close, we believe Stripe has built the premier financial‑infrastructure stack for the internet economy, relied on by the fastest‑growing companies for payments, billing, fraud prevention, tax, and more. While their core business has never been stronger, we believe their most transformative chapters are being written right now. We believe Stripe’s lead will only expand across the future of money movement due to their leadership in agentic commerce, stablecoins, and more.”
— Kareem Zaki, partner at Thrive Capital
New Businesses on Stripe Are Scaling at Record Speed
- The 2025 cohort is the highest‑performing in Stripe’s history.
- 57 % of new Stripe customers are based outside the United States.
- Companies in the 2025 cohort grew ≈ 50 % faster than those in 2024.
- The number of companies reaching $10 M ARR within three months of launch doubled versus 2024.
- 20 % of Stripe Atlas startups charged their first customer within 30 days (up from 8 % in 2020).
Businesses on Stripe Are Increasingly Global by Default
The “domestic market” for the new generation of internet businesses is now the internet itself. Notable AI‑powered products launched globally by default include:
Among Stripe businesses with primarily international revenue, 30 % of that revenue comes from countries that are neither the company’s home market nor one of the top 10 global economies.
“This isn’t merely about incremental revenue from a ‘long tail’ of international users. In many cases, the ‘long tail’ is much of the dog,” the Collisons wrote.
Building the Economic Infrastructure for AI
Agentic commerce has entered a phase of building and real‑world experimentation. As with the early internet, its future success hinges on universal interoperability. To that end, Stripe has been collaborating with a broad set of partners across AI labs, retailers, and leading e‑commerce platforms:
- Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) – Co‑developed with OpenAI to establish a shared, open‑by‑design technical language between AI platforms and businesses.
- Agentic Commerce Suite – Tooling that lets businesses sell across multiple AI interfaces and protocols with a single integration. Early adopters include Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Etsy, Coach, and Kate Spade.
- Shared Payment Tokens – A new payment primitive that enables agents to initiate payments without exposing credentials, usable even by businesses that don’t process payments through Stripe.
- Machine Payments – Allows developers to charge agents directly for API calls, MCP usage, and HTTP requests using stable‑coin micropayments.
Ripe partnered with OpenAI to power the first shopping experiences inside ChatGPT. Stripe is also collaborating with Microsoft to bring similar capabilities to Copilot.
Philippe Laffont, Founder and Portfolio Manager of Coatue Management, commented:
“In the AI era, Stripe is emerging as the default financial layer for companies at the frontier of the ‘token economy’ in its work with the world’s top startups and enterprises. As intelligent agents begin to participate in commerce, companies are turning to Stripe to handle payments and money movement at global scale.”
Stablecoin Adoption Is Spiking
In 2025, the price of Bitcoin dropped precipitously, but stablecoin payments volume doubled to around $400 billion, 60 % of which is estimated to represent B2B payments. The stablecoin orchestration platform Bridge—acquired by Stripe last year—saw its volume more than quadruple.
- In July, Stripe acquired Privy, which powers more than 110 million programmable wallets.
- In September, Stripe unveiled Tempo, a blockchain purpose‑built for payments and incubated together with Paradigm. With Tempo, businesses get:
- Dedicated payment lanes
- Sub‑second finality
- Opt‑in privacy
- Interoperability with compliance and accounting systems
These features are crucial for supporting real‑world economic activity.
Alex Immerman, General Partner at a16z, said:
“Stripe has consistently aligned itself with the most important technology shifts—first e‑commerce and software‑as‑a‑service, and now agents and stablecoins—and has set a relentless pace of innovation for fifteen years and counting. As Stripe continues building the financial infrastructure of the internet economy, the company has become a default platform for the next generation of ambitious builders and enduring companies. We are thrilled to have been their partners since 2010 and even more excited to deepen our partnership today.”
Further Reading
For more information, Stripe’s full 2025 annual letter is available online.