Stripe just reminded the market that gravity is optional when you own the rails. At a $159B valuation in its latest employee and shareholder tender, Stripe is not chasing headlines. Stripe is buying time, loyalty, and leverage. This is a secondary transaction, not a cash grab. Liquidity for employees. Control for the company. Thrive Capital, Coatue, and Andreessen Horowitz stepped in on the buy side while Stripe itself repurchased shares. That is conviction with a calculator in hand.
Patrick Collison and John Collison built this thing in 2010 with a simple premise: make moving money as programmable as sending data. Fast forward to 2025 and businesses processed $1.9T on Stripe, up from $1.4T the year before. That is roughly 34% growth at planetary scale. About 1.6% of global GDP now runs across their pipes. Quiet dominance tends to look like infrastructure.
And Stripe is not just moving payments. The Revenue Suite, which includes Billing, Tax, Invoicing, and Revenue Recognition, is on track for a $1B annual run rate. More than 350 product updates in a single year. Acquisitions like Privy and Metronome folded into the stack. Stablecoin infrastructure through Bridge. AI commerce experiments with OpenAI. When software eats the world, Stripe charges it for dessert.
The company says it is robustly profitable. That word matters. Profit buys patience. Patience buys optionality. Optionality keeps you private at $159B while everyone else argues about IPO windows. The 2026 valuation is more than 70% higher than the 2025 tender at roughly $91.5B. Same company. Sharper fundamentals. Bigger engine.
Credit where it is due. Patrick Collison, Co-founder and CEO, continues to play long ball. John Collison, Co-founder and President, keeps the operating rhythm tight. Around them, a leadership bench that reads like a fintech kill list. Will Gaybrick driving product and business. Steffan Tomlinson guarding the balance sheet as CFO. David Singleton steering technology as CTO. Jeff Titterton shaping the narrative as CMO. Eileen O’Mara scaling revenue as CRO. Trish Walsh keeping the legal edges clean as General Counsel. This is what happens when you treat payments like plumbing and then quietly own the building.
For founders watching from the cheap seats, the lesson is not raise at any cost. It is build until the numbers talk back. Grow volume. Ship relentlessly. Expand your surface area without bloating your core. Stripe did not spike to $159B on vibes. It compounded.
And if $1.9T in volume is 1.6% of global GDP, the more interesting question is not how big Stripe is. It is how much of the remaining 98.4% still has to choose its rails.
