Irish-founded fintech Stripe said it has reached agreement with investors that will allow it buy shares from current and former staff in a deal that values the company at $91.5 billion (€87.3 billion).
That puts the payments company within reach of the $95 billion valuation it had before a post-Covid slump in the tech industry.
Stripe was last year valued at $70 billion, when Sequoia Capital offered to buy shares from investors looking to cash out of the fintech.
Cofounder John Collison reiterated there were still no immediate plans for an initial public offering (IPO) despite ongoing speculation the company would go public.
Stripe, cofounded by brothers Patrick and John Collison in 2010, has built an extensive payments infrastructure for companies and handles billions of dollars in transactions each year.
In its latest update, the company said businesses generated $1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38 per cent year-on-year.
“We attribute this year’s rapid growth in part to our long-standing investments in building machine learning and artificial intelligence into our products,” the company said.
“These bets continue to pay off, increasing revenue for existing customers, encouraging more businesses to switch to Stripe, and helping new companies reach significant scale unprecedentedly quickly.”
The company said 2024 was “an unusually good year” and that future growth rates would fluctuate, but it remained enthusiastic about the long-term trends in the internet economy.
Although it did not provide figures, Stripe said it was profitable in 2024 and expected to continue to be so in 2025 and beyond, allowing it continue to invest in research and development.
Among the developments that will reshape the industry, Stripe highlighted stablecoins, a digital currency, and AI, both of which the company has invested in.
Company president John Collison pointed to the number of AI companies using Stripe, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Mistral, and said Stripe’s systems were also being optimised for use with AI agents.
Stripe last year acquired stablecoin platform Bridge in a deal worth $1.1 billion.
“There’s a lot of hot air in the crypto world, but there’s also now increasingly utility,” Mr Collison said. “We think that stable coins are, to us, the most interesting thing happening in crypto and really providing a lot of real world utility. We think it could plausibly become quite big. It’s small today, but these things always start small.”
Looking at the wider tech landscape in Ireland, Mr Collison said the tech ecosystem was much more advanced than when Stripe, which was built initially in the US and now dual-headquartered in Ireland, was first starting out.
However, there are concerns around competitiveness, with Mr Collision highlighting the issues with Dublin Airport and its passenger cap and the ongoing housing crisis. That comes following concerns expressed by chip giant Intel to the Government around Irish competitiveness.
“I would like to see more concern in Ireland about our seeming inability to solve obvious infrastructural problems,” he said. “I think Intel’s concerns are well placed. Stripe is less exposed to them because we are not, as a company, trying to build large, physical things. We are not subject to these restrictions in the same way, but as industry observers, we are similarly concerned.”
