Digital payments platform Stripe has yet to lay out plans to go public, but in the meantime the company has thrown past and present employees a line for some liquidity. The company on Thursday confirmed a tender offer where investors will buy up shares from those employees at a valuation of $91.5 billion. Stripe said it will also repurchase shares as part of the transaction.
A spokesperson declined to say who is in the secondary round except to confirm that it is “largely” existing investors. Past backers of the company number at over 150 investors per PitchBook data. They include General Catalyst, GV, Silver Lake, Atomico, Elon Musk, Salesforce and many more.
The tender offer is a decent jump on the company’s valuation from its last secondary sale a year ago, which was valued at $70 billion. However, Stripe still fell short of its high-watermark $95 billion valuation back in 2021. That round came at a time when e-commerce itself was booming due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it made Stripe, at the time and only on paper, the most valuable privately-held tech company in the world.
The news coincides with Stripe’s annual letter penned by CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison, which noted that payment volume in 2024 grew to $1.4 trillion, up 38% on the year before.
It’s a big number for Stripe, but to put it into some context, Visa said that its payment volume for 2024 was $13.2 trillion. The margin that Stripe makes on transactions (which are what make up payment volume) remains thin, and so this business remains one where it still has room to (and needs to) scale.
Stripe also added that it is now used by half of the Fortune 100 companies, underscoring how it has catapulted from a startup working with other startups, into a major enterprise player.
The tender offer was originally reported to be in the works earlier this month.