Stripe publishes 2025 annual letter and announces tender offer to provide liquidity to current and former employees

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• Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34% from 2024, and equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP.

• Beyond payments, Stripe’s Revenue suite is on track to hit an annual run rate of $1 billion this year.

• Stripe powers 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80% of the Nasdaq 100, and the cohort of companies that joined Stripe in 2025 is the highest performing yet.

SAN FRANCISCO AND DUBLIN—Stripe, the programmable financial services company, has signed agreements with investors to provide liquidity to current and former Stripe employees through a tender offer at a $159B (€135B) valuation. While the majority of funds for the tender offer are being provided by investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue, a16z, and others, Stripe will also use a portion of its own capital to repurchase shares.

Stripe also published its 2025 annual letter to the Stripe community, detailing a strong year for businesses on Stripe and the internet economy overall. Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34% from 2024, and equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP. Beyond payments, Stripe’s Revenue suite (comprising Stripe Billing, Invoicing, Tax, and more) is on track to hit an annual run rate of $1 billion this year.

In the letter, cofounders Patrick and John Collison wrote:

"Our programmable financial services now power more than 5 million businesses directly or via platforms, including all of the top AI companies, many of the largest blue-chip companies (90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average), most of the biggest tech companies (80% of the Nasdaq 100), and a significant fraction of freshly minted startups (25% of all Delaware corporations are now created with Stripe Atlas) [...] Stripe remained robustly profitable, allowing us to continue investing heavily in product development (with more than 350 product updates last year) as well as acquisitions. […] All in all, 2025 was a strong year for the internet economy, and we’re delighted to see so many of Stripe’s customers do so well.”

Kareem Zaki, partner at Thrive Capital, said: "After a decade of partnership and seeing their work up close, we believe Stripe has built the premiere financial infrastructure stack for the internet economy, relied on by the fastest growing companies for payments, billing, fraud prevention, tax, and more. While their core business has never been stronger, we believe their most transformative chapters are being written right now. We believe Stripe's lead will only expand across the future of money movement due to their leadership in agentic commerce, stablecoins, and more."

New businesses on Stripe are scaling at record speed

The 2025 cohort of new businesses on Stripe is the highest performing in the company’s history. More new companies joined Stripe in 2025 than ever before, with more than half (57%) based outside the US. Businesses in the 2025 cohort grew around 50% faster than the 2024 cohort. The number of companies reaching $10 million ARR within 3 months of launch was double the 2024 count. Companies incorporated via Stripe Atlas are also monetizing sooner: in 2025, 20% of Atlas startups charged their first customer within 30 days, up from 8% in 2020.

Businesses on Stripe are increasingly global by default

Over the last few years, the country-by-country expansion model has melted away. The “domestic market” for a new generation of internet businesses is the internet itself. Nearly every recognizable AI product launched globally by default, including ChatGPT, Claude, Replit, Lovable, Base44, Vercel, Cursor, Midjourney, and many more. Among Stripe businesses with mostly international revenue, 30% of that revenue comes from countries that are neither their home market nor one of the top 10 global economies.

“This isn’t merely about incremental revenue from a ‘long tail’ of international users. In many cases, the ‘long tail’ is much of the dog,” the Collisons wrote.

Building the economic infrastructure for AI

Agentic commerce has moved into a phase of building and real-world experimentation. As with the early internet, the future success of agentic commerce is contingent on universal interoperability.

To that end, Stripe has been working with a broad set of partners across AI labs, retailers, and leading ecommerce platforms to lay the groundwork for this generational shift:

• With OpenAI, Stripe developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to establish a shared technical language between AI platforms and businesses, open by design.

• Stripe launched an Agentic Commerce Suite, which provides tooling for businesses to sell across multiple AI interfaces and protocols with a single integration. Brands already onboarding include Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Etsy, Coach, and Kate Spade.

• Stripe introduced Shared Payment Tokens, a new payment primitive that lets agents initiate payments without exposing credentials, usable even by businesses that don’t process payments with Stripe.

• Stripe launched machine payments, a way for developers to charge agents directly for API calls, MCP usage, and HTTP requests using stablecoin micropayments.

• Stripe partnered with OpenAI to power the first shopping experiences inside ChatGPT. Stripe is also collaborating with Microsoft to bring similar capabilities to Copilot.

Philippe Laffont, Founder and Portfolio Manager of Coatue Management, commented: "In the AI era, Stripe is emerging as the default financial layer for companies at the frontier of the 'token economy' in its work with the world's top startups and enterprises. As intelligent agents begin to participate in commerce, companies are turning to Stripe to handle payments and money movement at global scale."

Stablecoin adoption is spiking

In 2025, the price of Bitcoin dropped precipitously, but stablecoin payments volume doubled to around $400 billion, 60% of which is estimated to represent B2B payments. Bridge, the stablecoin orchestration platform Stripe acquired last year, saw volume more than quadruple.

In July, Stripe acquired Privy, which powers more than 110 million programmable wallets. In September, Stripe unveiled Tempo, a blockchain purpose-built for payments, incubated together with Paradigm. With Tempo, businesses get dedicated payment lanes, sub-second finality, opt-in privacy, and interoperability with compliance and accounting systems—important features for supporting real world economic activity.

Alex Immerman, General Partner at a16z, said: "Stripe has consistently aligned itself with the most important technology shifts—first ecommerce and software-as-a-service, and now agents and stablecoins—and has set a relentless pace of innovation for fifteen years and counting. As Stripe continues building the financial infrastructure of the internet economy, the company has become a default platform for the next generation of ambitious builders and enduring companies. We are thrilled to have been their partners since 2010 and even more excited to deepen our partnership today."

For more information, Stripe’s full 2025 annual letter is available online.