Stripe hits a $159B valuation after an employee share sale to investors like Thrive, Coatue, and a16z, a 70% jump from its $92B valuation in February 2025
Financial TimesAkila Quinio
Context & Ripple Effects
Stripe’s valuation has moved through a pronounced private-market cycle: it was valued at $65B in a 2024 employee-share buyback, after a previously reported $55B–$60B fundraising target. The new transaction places it well above those intervening marks while still using a secondary sale rather than a public listing.
The sale also follows Stripe’s stated lack of urgency to go public, making its earlier preference to remain private more consequential: employees and former employees can transact with large investors without an IPO.
First-order effects
The employee share sale gives holders an immediate route to sell shares, while Thrive, Coatue, and a16z obtain or expand exposure at a $159B valuation.
The higher mark raises the benchmark against which Stripe’s private financing, employee equity compensation, and prospective liquidity programs will be evaluated.
Large growth investors participating in the sale signal continued demand for scaled private fintech exposure, concentrating investor attention on the small set of companies able to offer secondary liquidity.
Third-order effects
If secondary sales continue to supply meaningful liquidity, mature private technology companies may be able to defer IPO decisions while still periodically resetting employee and investor ownership.
That would make private-market price discovery more dependent on discrete, investor-led transactions rather than continuous public trading, with valuations potentially moving in larger steps between sales.
The trend: Mature private fintechs are increasingly using secondary transactions to deliver liquidity and establish valuation benchmarks without immediately entering public markets.
Stripe on the singularity “We're reminded of the phenomenon of falling into a large black hole. If you ever experience that particular misfortune, you won't actually feel anything special at the moment you cross the event horizon: the path is locally smooth, even though the
In our annual letter, we describe the progression we expect in agentic commerce. You tend to hear the later levels discussed in the hype, but we're already seeing lots of activity in levels 1 and 2 of agentic commerce. Read more: https://stripe.com/... [image]
Clinical trials as barrier to drug development in the AI era. Technologies are only as powerful as the institutional and cultural frameworks in which they operate allow them to be. Software doesn't have to worry about this as much, but atoms innovation doesn't have this luxury [i…
Stripe's annual letter is out: https://stripe.com/... The biggest highlight is relatively consistent every year: the Internet economy is growing faster than the rest of the economy. This has compounded for enough years that it is essentially _the_ growth engine in places.
For @stripe's 2025 annual letter released today, we dug into a ton of macro data. One pattern jumps out: the economy is sorting winners and losers faster than before. As @collision put it—"the sorting machine is whirring faster". /1
The internet economy is speeding up! We just released our annual letter, detailing everything we're seeing with startup formation, agentic commerce, stablecoins, and lots more. https://stripe.com/...
“Is 2025 an anomaly or the beginning of a new regime? Time will adjudicate, but our best guess is that the 2025 acceleration is the start of a larger inflection in entrepreneurship and creativity facilitated by advances in large language models.” https://stripe.com/...
The internet economy is speeding up: new businesses on @stripe in 2025 are by far the highest performing and fastest we've seen, growing around 50% faster than the 2024 cohort. [image]
Our @stripe 2025 letter: - $1.9T volume (1.6% of global GDP) - 5M businesses - 1 in 4 new DE corps via @atlas - '25 cohort growing 50% faster vs. '24 - 2x users w/ $10M ARR in 3 mo - 57% of new users non-US - 200M @link users - Loans to 81K biz - 100K vibe'd sandboxes - 3K words
“Last year, businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34% from 2024, and equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP.” 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 Stripe's 2025 Annual Letter: https://stripe.com/...
Stripe's annual letter is out! Last year, businesses on Stripe processed $1.9T in volume (+34% YoY) ≈ 1.6% of global GDP The 2025 cohort is the strongest ever: 50% faster growth vs 2024 on average Stripe now supports: 5M+ businesses 90% of DJI, 80% of NDX, 25% of Delaware
Stripe revalued at $159bn (€135bn) after staff tender. $1.9tn payment volume, up 34% Spoke to John Collison. - Housing/infrastucture: “people should be fed up” - Banks not lending enough - US Trump tariffs + he spoke about interviewing Elon Musk https://www.independent.ie/... [im…