Stripe Is Worth $159 Billion and Still Won't Go Public. Is It Worth It?

Good morning, Mason here,

Today's issue is another deep dive. One company, start to finish.

In 2010, two brothers from a village in Ireland decided that taking payments online was way too hard.

Sixteen years later, Stripe moves $1.9 trillion a year, about 1.6 percent of global GDP.

It's worth $159 billion, it's profitable, and it still won't go public.

This summer it even tried to buy PayPal.

So is any of this worth the price?

Read time: 8 mins

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THE DEEP DIVE

Dromineer, the Tipperary village where the Collisons grew up. Photo: David P Howard via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Patrick and John Collison grew up in Dromineer, a tiny village on a lake in County Tipperary. Patrick won Ireland's BT Young Scientist competition at 16. Patrick went to MIT and John went to Harvard, and both dropped out.

Before Stripe there was Auctomatic, a tool for people selling on eBay. The brothers sold it for roughly $5 million in 2008. Neither of them was 20 yet. Along the way they kept running into the same problem: getting set up to take payments online meant weeks of bank paperwork.

The fix came in 2010. They called it /dev/payments at first, then Stripe. Early checks came from Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel, $2 million in all, and the public launch followed in September 2011.

Their early sales trick is Silicon Valley legend. Paul Graham called it the "Collison installation." When someone said they'd try Stripe, the brothers didn't send a link. They asked for the person's laptop and set it up right there.

Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison in 2015. Photo: JD Lasica via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The first pitch was simple. A developer could add payments to a website with a few lines of code instead of weeks of back and forth with a bank.

Then the list kept growing. Connect for marketplaces in 2012. Atlas for starting a company and Radar for fraud in 2016. Billing for subscriptions in 2018. Then Issuing, Capital, Treasury, Terminal and Tax. Stripe says its revenue tools, like Billing, Invoicing and Tax, are on track for a $1 billion run rate this year.

Then it went back into crypto, which it had once walked away from. Stripe closed a $1.1 billion deal for stablecoin startup Bridge in 2025, bought wallet maker Privy and helped incubate Tempo, a payments blockchain that went live in March.

Now it's AI. Stripe powers checkout inside ChatGPT and wrote a standard with OpenAI for AI agents to buy things. In August it agreed to buy OpenRouter, which sends developers' requests to hundreds of AI models through one connection. The New York Times put the price around $7.5 billion. Three months earlier, OpenRouter had raised at roughly $1.3 billion.

Stripe's headquarters in South San Francisco. Photo: Coolcaesar via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The basic deal hasn't changed much. A standard U.S. card payment online costs 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, and Stripe takes its cut from that.

Most of that fee goes to card networks and banks, though. The Information reported about $6.8 billion of revenue in 2025 on $1.9 trillion of volume. If that's Stripe's net take, as most estimates treat it, that's roughly 36 cents of every $100 moving through it.

It's a cash machine now. The Information also reported $3.2 billion in free cash flow last year, up 52 percent, and $2 billion of revenue in just the first quarter of 2026. Stripe's own letter only says it's "robustly profitable."

The fine print: none of these financials are audited or public. They come from reporting and Stripe's annual letter, so you're taking them partly on trust.

Stripe co-founder and president John Collison (left) with EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen in Brussels, April 2025. Photo: European Commission via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

More than 5 million businesses used Stripe to get paid last year. Link, its saved-checkout feature, passed 200 million users by September 2025.

The AI boom is landing right on Stripe's doorstep. According to The Information, Stripe handles subscription and usage billing for AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. Every time one of them charges a customer, Stripe gets a slice.

Stablecoins are the other new lane. Stripe's letter says stablecoin payment volume across the market doubled to about $400 billion in 2025, and around 60 percent of it was business-to-business.

The risk is leverage. The bigger a customer gets, the harder it can push on fees, and the easier it is to split volume with a rival like Adyen.

Stripe's Dublin office, which opened as its second headquarters in 2025. Photo: Conor McCabe via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Look at the price over time and there's a hole in the middle. Back in 2016 investors put it at $9.2 billion, and three years later it was $35 billion. By March 2021 no U.S. startup was worth more: $95 billion.

Then 2022 happened. Its own internal mark had already slid to $74 billion when it laid off about 14 percent of the company that November. The next March it took $6.5 billion at a $50 billion price. It didn't need the money to run the business. Most of it went to paying taxes on employee stock.

Then it came roaring back. Tender offers valued it at $91.5 billion in February 2025, $106.7 billion that September and $159 billion this February. MSCI's private market data put it near $186 billion in mid-October.

What it hasn't done is IPO. Stripe keeps running tender offers so employees can sell shares, and that lets it stay private for as long as it wants.

PayPal's headquarters in San Jose, Calif., in 2013. Photo: Sagar Savla via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Its closest public rival is Adyen, the Dutch company behind payments for a lot of big global brands. Adyen processed about €1.4 trillion last year on €2.36 billion of net revenue, and it was worth roughly €33 billion this summer.

Then there's PayPal, which moved $1.79 trillion last year, almost as much as Stripe. In July, Stripe and private equity firm Advent offered $60.50 a share, more than $53 billion, to buy it. PayPal's board said no, and the pair reportedly walked away in late August. Last week Startup Fortune, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported talks are back on at a higher price. Nothing is signed.

Think about what that offer says. Stripe and Advent were ready to pay about a third of Stripe's own value for a company moving nearly the same volume.

The next fight is AI. Every AI lab and cloud wants to control how agents pay for things. Stripe's bet is that it's already sitting in the middle.

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THE VERDICT: IS $159 BILLION TOO MUCH?

Six parts. It comes down to two arguments.

The bull case is strong. Volume grew 34 percent to $1.9 trillion. Revenue reportedly grew about a third. It produces billions in cash. And it's early in stablecoins and AI agents, the two newest ways money moves.

The bear case is real too. The financials aren't audited. Payments is a constant fight over fees. Its newest bets, Tempo, OpenRouter and maybe PayPal, are expensive and unproven. And the price is set in tender offers, not on a public market.

The math. At $159 billion, Stripe is worth about 23 times its reported 2025 revenue and about 50 times its free cash flow. Adyen trades around 14 times its revenue. So Stripe costs more, but it's also growing faster and throwing off far more cash.

The test: picture growth of 30 percent next year, then 25, then 20 and 20 again. Revenue ends up near $16 billion in 2030. Put a 10x multiple on that, which is still generous for a company growing 20 percent, and you get about $159 billion. In other words, the current price already bakes in four more great years.

For investors: Don't just look at the $1.9 trillion.

Look at how much of each dollar Stripe actually keeps.

Mason's take: Stripe might be the best-run private company out there. It's growing fast at a huge scale and throwing off real cash. I think $159 billion is fair, maybe even cheap if AI agents start paying for things on their own. What worries me is the shopping spree. Spending billions on OpenRouter and chasing PayPal is a lot of new risk for a company that didn't need to take any.

Founderscrowd Newsletter | Friday, October 30, 2026 | The Stripe deep dive

$2M from Thiel and Musk in 2011. $159B in 2026. PayPal next?