Stripe

Stripe provides application programming interfaces and software that let businesses accept payments online and in person, run subscriptions and invoicing, calculate sales tax, issue cards, fund merchants and incorporate companies through Stripe Atlas. Irish brothers Patrick Collison, the chief executive, and John Collison, the president, founded the company in Palo Alto, California, in 2010. It moved to San Francisco in 2012 and is now dual-headquartered in South San Francisco and Dublin. Customers named by Stripe include Amazon, Ford, Salesforce, BMW, Maersk, OpenAI and Anthropic, and Stripe was part of Y Combinator.

In May 2011 Stripe raised $2 million from Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, SV Angel and Andreessen Horowitz, and it launched publicly that September. Thrive Capital first invested in 2014. In March 2021 Stripe raised $600 million at a $95 billion valuation. In July 2022 The Wall Street Journal reported that its internal valuation had fallen to $74 billion. On March 15, 2023, Stripe announced a Series I of more than $6.5 billion at a $50 billion valuation, led by existing shareholders Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, MSD Partners and Thrive Capital, with new investors GIC, Goldman Sachs Asset and Wealth Management and Temasek. The proceeds paid for employee liquidity and equity-related tax withholding rather than operations. A February 2025 tender valued the company at $91.5 billion.

On February 24, 2026, Stripe announced a tender offer at a $159 billion valuation, funded mainly by Thrive Capital, Coatue and a16z, with Stripe also repurchasing shares. Businesses on Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34% from $1.4 trillion in 2024, and the company says it is profitable. Its Revenue suite, covering Billing, Invoicing and Tax, was expected to reach a $1 billion annual run rate in 2026. Stripe bought the stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2025 and agreed in August 2026 to acquire OpenRouter, an AI model routing service.

Stripe illustrates how a company can deliver liquidity to employees and early backers for more than fifteen years without an IPO. Seed investors from 2011 have been offered repeated tender and secondary windows instead of a listing; in July 2024 Sequoia Capital offered its own limited partners the chance to sell up to $861 million of Stripe shares. The valuation path, from $95 billion in 2021 to $50 billion in 2023 and $159 billion in 2026, shows how widely private marks for a single company can move.