Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter (opens in new tab)

The general public absolutely cannot. You have to be an accredited investor or qualified purchaser; you need to have access; you have to pay carry & fees (maybe multiple, stacked middlemen).

Is there a pure stripe fund though? What if I just want exposure to stripe and not the rest of their portfolio?

Not really. You still have to be an accredited investor AND financially savvy enough to have the awareness of what syndicate deals are and how to find them and participate.

How exactly?

It 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.

Stripe is reportedly proposing to buy PayPal.[1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/paypal-stock-stripe-acquisit...

PayPal 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".

Of course, the thing to note about PYPL is the absolute jump it took today on rumors of a Stripe acquisition.

Yes. 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.

valuation'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).

I would be surprised if Stripe has made less per transaction. Visa and Mastercard make way more transactions though.

Well, it's not exactly a fair comparison, since they're comparing a volume number with GDP, which is total value produced in a year. Volume numbers are usually much bigger than production numbers, since money moves around a lot.

If I pay a restaurant $200 for dinner and my three friends each venmo me $50 for their share, then the exchanged volume was $350, but only $200 worth of value was generated.

For 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

this number is a little misleading, to put it mildly.

Why will a number blow your mind? Have you thought about how Universe exists from nothing?

I built a payment processor and failed. Regulations aren’t the issue. The issue is customer psychology: once a customer has solved their problem, they never switch. The biggest misconception I had is that it’s a viable business model to start a business to “compete” with an existing one (cheaper, better tech, better UI, etc). That never works.

You have to either 1. Solve the problem for a new customer who hasn’t solved this problem. 2. Solve a totally different problem than your competition. or 3. Invent a completely different paradigm for approaching solving that problem.

A good case study is search. Nobody could compete with Google, until ChatGPT. Note that ChatGPT is not just “Google but better”, but instead does (3): it’s a different paradigm for answering your questions. Even though it’s much better at solving this problem, people still don’t switch from Google. Most of ChatGPT growth comes from (1): new customers, because ChatGPT usage is highest among young people who haven’t already solved their problem and aren’t sticky with Google.

You underestimate how sticky customers are out of habit. Cable news is now an inferior product for information retrieval, but it’s sticky because it’s already there, solving the problem, for that generation.

> "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...

good 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.

Something 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.

You need an annual income of $200K to become an accredited investor. If you don't have that, you anyways shouldn't be participating in risky private markets.

If anything they should also restrict options trading, sports gambling, prediction markets etc. to accredited investors.

If you don't meet the financial requirement ($200K annual income or $1M net worth), you can also qualify as an accredited investor by passing the Series 65 exam and filing a form with the SEC.

So you have to prove that either you can afford to lose some money or you have enough investing knowledge to know what you're getting into. Seems fair.

It is not 5x bigger, it is 5x more valuable. Obviously Stripes 2x higher revenue is part of that equation, but not all of it.

Not all revenue is equal. Payments is interesting because the processor’s growth is directly tied to the growth of its customers. Stripe captures the vast majority of high growth SF startups. Stripe has better customers.

According to wikipedia, Stripe had a revenue of 5.1B in 2024.

If a maintainer has chosen to open source and use a permissive license (key word chosen, this isn't a default), they are explicitly saying via their license that they are not charging for the use of the code. What's the issue here?

If a maintainer wants to make money directly from their code, they are free to charge for it, or for services around it (examples: Sidekiq, Oban, Tailwind, not to mention large examples like RedHat or Ubuntu).

Everyone involved is making informed choices.

Well 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.

Not sure what that letter said but open source^ isn’t good and I’m what people would incorrectly stereotype as someone who would love open source as a Marxist [sympathizer].

^outside of specific scenarios where it fights back against the status quo like open source AI models.

Stripe 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.

It’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.

Why ask for IPO to dillute the effective investor pool if you are already making a ton of money consistently?

Everything's public appearance until S1 is filed

I hope they hold off - going public tends to kill innovation and replace it with bureaucracy

The 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.

Companies 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.

I 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.

The cynic in me thinks they don't want to crash their valuation.

How do you ruin a good company? Simple. Go public

Will they ever have to go public? I imagine there's a way they can buy everything back.

why 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.

Might 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).

Investors 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.

I find Stripes fees excessive too, but I don’t think I’ll ever switch. I’ve been running a small SaaS product on the side of other work for >15 years and if it taught me one thing, it’s that I need to reduce the things I have to maintain, reduce manual work, reduce the things that can go wrong. There’s nothing worse than having to fix a bug in a codebase you haven’t touched for a year and possibly in a feature you haven’t touched in many years. I simply love that Stripe handles not just the payment, but the payment application, the subscription billing, the price settings, the exports for bookkeeping. I’ve had a few instances where my site was used fraudulently to check stolen credit cards and it was quickly flagged and I could resolve it with Stripe. I’m sure someone can mention alternatives and I’m sure that I could build something that would work myself, but they keep a big part of what it takes to run the business out of my mind and I’m willing to pay for that.

In the EU and had to switch from Stripe to Mollie due to Stripe thinking the client was a cruise company because they rent 'cruiser' boats for river leisure. Mollie was super easy to implement for them, and fees much better

I'm using Helcim here in Canada. It's not great. Stripe used to be far nicer to use, has become fairly bloated and messy, yet it's still far nicer to use in general. The developer-first roots are still apparent.

Helcim takes ages to respond to tickets. They still haven't fully set up my account after weeks. You can't just do sandboxes or dev mode by default; you have to speak to a human via email who sets it up for you and provide the test card numbers. It takes ages.

The rates are much better and once it's fully set up and integrated, I guess it'll be fine? I'm not looking forward to needing support and adding further integrations.

I guess the moral here is that Stripe has gotten worse for small projects, but it's still really good.

You can't really do better than stripe. The onboarding overhead is because of fraud and the costs are basically barely above interchange.

Paypal 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/q...

I don't know you have paypal and stripe in the same sentence. Paypal is not a great service at all.

This multiple is indirectly a bet on AI growth , because Stripe is the payment processor for the vast majority of AI startups.

It 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?