Patrick Collison, chief executive officer and co-founder of Stripe Inc., left, smiles as John Collison, president and co-founder of Stripe Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Studio 1.0 television interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Friday, March 23, 2018.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Stripe has once again shown why sometimes it’s better to be private.
During a February sell-off for fintech stocks, Block plunged almost 30%, its steepest decline since 2022, alongside drops of 20% or more for PayPal and Coinbase and a 9% slide in shares of SoFi. Meanwhile, Stripe on Thursday announced a tender offer for employee shares at a $91.5 billion valuation, making the payments company significantly more valuable than any of its public market peers.
“In general, they benefit from being private because there’s a handful of stocks that people want to buy and they trade at a premium to public valuations,” said Larry Albukerk, founder of EB Exchange, which helps facilitate trades in shares of pre-IPO companies.
He said Stripe is part of an exclusive group of private companies, along with SpaceX, Anthropic and Anduril, which are all seeing sky-high demand from investors.
“For every one of those, there’s 100 companies that don’t get that kind of premium,” Albukerk said.
The Collison brothers — Patrick and John — founded Stripe in 2010, a year after Jack Dorsey started Square, which is now part of Block. Crypto exchange Coinbase and online lender SoFi were both launched after Stripe.
While all of those companies went the traditional route of raising large amounts of capital from prominent venture capital firms, only Stripe has chosen to stay private. To relieve some pressure for liquidity, Stripe regularly allows early investors and employees to sell a portion of their stake. The tender offer this week marks a 40% increase from a year ago and gets the company close to its peak valuation of $95 billion that it reached in the frothy days of the Covid pandemic.
“We are not dogmatic on the public vs. private question,” John Collison, the company’s president, told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin this week, adding that Stripe has “no near-term IPO plans.”
Stripe’s peers have all had to report quarterly results of late, and it’s created a hefty dose of volatility and some concern. Last week, Block reported fourth-quarter earnings and revenue that missed analysts’ expectations, pushing the stock down 18%, its third-worst one-day drop on record.
PayPal shares tumbled even though the company blew past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Coinbase topped expectations with revenue soaring 130%, powered by a post-election spike in crypto prices. Coinbase was a leading contributor to Republicans’ sweeping victory in November in its effort to help push forward a more crypto-friendly agenda in Washington, D.C.
But Coinbase fell earlier this week to its lowest price since just before the election, tumbling in tandem with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
It’s been a rough stretch for stocks overall, particularly in the tech sector. The Nasdaq fell about 5% in February, its worst month since September 2023. The S&P 500 declined 2.3%.
Investors have been rattled in recent days by President Donald Trump’s promise of tariffs and economic reports flashing warning signs. Notably, initial filings for unemployment benefits hit their highest level of the year last week in another potential sign of weakness in the labor market.
Fintechs can be more sensitive to economic conditions than the broader tech sector because they’re more directly effected by interest rates, employment data and consumer confidence.
Private market premium
By remaining private, Stripe is able to skirt the daily, weekly and monthly stock swings while also disclosing far fewer numbers to the public regarding its financial health.
The biggest revelation Stripe offered in its annual letter on Thursday is that it generated $1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38% from the year prior. The company said it was profitable in 2024, and expects to remain so this year, without providing specifics, and the only revenue figure it offered was that its finance and tax reporting unit topped a $500 million run rate.
Kelly Rodriques, CEO of private securities marketplace Forge, said Stripe’s valuation jump shows there’s enthusiasm for private companies, even some that aren’t focused specifically on artificial intelligence. Forge’s Private Market Index, which tracks demand for shares in private companies, has surged more than 33% in the past three months, and that’s before Stripe’s latest announcement.
“Stripe’s valuation increase could be further evidence of the broad rally we’re observing in the private market that is now rippling beyond the AI sector, which has driven most of the momentum over the last several months,” Rodriques said in an email.
Albukerk noted that another aspect to the spike in Stripe’s price is the scarcity of volume available for investors and the difficulty in getting access to it other than through the tender offers.
It’s one of those private companies “where there’s a lot of demand and very little supply,” he said.
However, just being private doesn’t eliminate Stripe’s other challenges.
In his interview on “Squawk Box,” John Collison highlighted the growing complexity of financial compliance and said banks are becoming more conservative in their partnerships with fintechs.
“We have started to see the financial system become more involved in financial policy enforcement,” Collison said. “And then you tend to get these occasional flare-ups from time to time.”
Both Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs have distanced themselves from the company, according to The Information, prompting Stripe to turn to Deutsche Bank and other institutions for key services. Collison didn’t provide details to CNBC, but acknowledged that Stripe has had to navigate shifting relationships.
“Banks are tightly regulated, and they in general want to have a sound book of business,” he said. “They don’t want to get into arguments with their regulator.” According to The Information, Stripe has tripled its risk and compliance headcount to 700 employees over the past two years.
The area with the most regulatory scrutiny has been crypto, which was a notoriously challenging area for companies to operate during the Biden administration. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation recently released internal records obtained via FOIA requests, revealing that regulators had sent “pause letters” urging banks to reconsider relationships with crypto firms.
Trump has made a point of loosening restrictions on crypto, and one of his first actions as president was to sign an executive order to promote the advancement of cryptocurrencies in the U.S. and work toward potentially developing a national digital asset stockpile
Stripe made its biggest jump into crypto with the closing this month of its $1.1 billion purchase of Bridge, a provider of stablecoin infrastructure. Stripe’s goal with the deal is to enable more payments via crypto, as Bridge focuses on making it easier for businesses to accept stablecoin payments without having to directly deal in digital tokens.
In its annual letter, Stripe said that stablecoin transactions more than doubled between the fourth quarter of 2023 and the same period last year.
“The fundamentals for stablecoin adoption have only recently fallen into place, enabling the explosive growth we now see,” the company wrote.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with Stripe co-founder and president John Collison
