Why Stripe’s $140bn Valuation Isn’t an IPO — It’s a Strategy

Every time Stripe’s valuation ticks upward, the same question resurfaces: when is the IPO? The payments company is now arranging a tender offer that would value it at more than $140 billion, up from $107 billion last autumn and nearly triple the $50 billion low it hit during the 2023 tech correction. The reflex is to read this as a prelude to listing. It isn’t. It’s the opposite.

Stripe isn’t warming up for an IPO. It’s building a permanent alternative to one.

The Tender Offer Playbook

Since achieving profitability in 2024, Stripe has conducted tender offers roughly every six months at steadily increasing valuations. Each round allows employees and early investors to sell shares and access liquidity without the company surrendering the one thing the Collison brothers clearly prize above all else: control.

The mechanics are straightforward. Stripe arranges a buyer pool of institutional investors willing to purchase shares at a set price. Sellers get cash. Buyers get exposure to one of the world’s most important fintech platforms. Stripe stays private. Nobody files an S-1.

At $140 billion, the company would trade at roughly seven times its estimated 2025 gross revenue of $19.4 billion. That’s actually a discount to public peers like Adyen, which remains one of Europe’s most profitable fintechs and trades at a higher multiple. It’s a premium to where Stripe sat 18 months ago, but it’s hardly frothy given the company processed $1.4 trillion in total payment volume last year and is growing revenue at 28% annually.

The point is that every function an IPO traditionally serves — price discovery, liquidity, investor access, employee monetisation — is now being handled through private market infrastructure. The tender offer is the IPO, just without the roadshow, the quarterly earnings calls, and the short sellers.

Why Going Public Makes Less Sense Than Ever

When Stripe co-founder John Collison told Bloomberg at Davos in January that the company was “still not in any rush” to list, it wasn’t a deflection. It was a strategy statement.

Consider what Stripe would gain from an IPO. Access to capital? The company raised $6.5 billion in 2023 and hasn’t needed to raise since. It’s profitable and cash-generative. Brand awareness? Stripe powers payments for Amazon, Google, and Shopify. It doesn’t need a ticker symbol for credibility. Liquidity for shareholders? That’s precisely what the tender offers provide.

Now consider what it would lose. Public companies face quarterly earnings scrutiny that incentivises short-term thinking. They absorb significant compliance and reporting costs — challenges that upcoming EU financial rules are already making harder for fintechs operating across European markets. And they open themselves up to activist investors and market volatility that has nothing to do with business fundamentals. Stripe watched peers like Affirm and Marqeta go public and then spend years trading well below their IPO valuations. The lesson was not lost.

The Acquisitions Tell the Story

What Stripe is doing with its freedom from public markets matters more than the valuation headline. Over the past 18 months, the company has executed a rapid acquisition strategy that would be far harder to pursue under public market scrutiny.

It acquired Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure platform, for $1.1 billion in late 2024. It bought Privy, a wallet infrastructure company, in mid-2025 and then Valora, a crypto wallet, in December. In January this year, it closed the acquisition of Metronome, a usage-based billing platform designed for AI companies.

Each deal fits a clear thesis: Stripe is positioning itself as the financial infrastructure layer for both the stablecoin economy and the AI economy simultaneously. CEO Patrick Collison said it plainly when announcing the Metronome deal: metered pricing is the native business model for the AI era, and the associated shift in how businesses generate revenue could be bigger than the original rise of SaaS. This mirrors the broader transformation AI is driving across financial services, where infrastructure players are being rewarded for moving fastest.

That kind of long-horizon strategic positioning is far easier when you don’t have analysts asking why margins dipped a quarter after you spent a billion dollars on a crypto company.

The Payments War Stripe Is Quietly Winning

Stripe’s dominance looks even more significant when set against the intensifying battle for control of global payments infrastructure. In Europe, regulators are pushing homegrown alternatives like Wero, which has already scaled to more than 43 million users in an effort to reduce the continent’s dependence on American card networks. The broader push to break away from Visa and Mastercard is reshaping how money moves across borders.

Stripe sits in a unique position within this upheaval. It is American, but it operates as infrastructure that other payment systems — including European alternatives — are built on top of. Whether merchants route transactions through card rails, instant bank transfers, or stablecoins, Stripe wants to be the software layer that makes it all work. That platform-agnostic positioning is why the company can thrive regardless of which payment networks win the geopolitical contest.

The New Template

Stripe isn’t alone in choosing to stay private. SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI have all resisted listing well past the point where previous generations of companies would have done so. But Stripe may be the clearest example of a company that has solved every traditional justification for an IPO without actually completing one.

The $140 billion tender isn’t a step toward the public markets. It’s proof they’ve become optional. For Europe’s fintechs watching from across the Atlantic, the lesson is clear: the most valuable payments company in the world has decided that the best way to build for the long term is to stay answerable only to itself.

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