Stripe is one of the oldest fintech unicorns to remain a private company. Founded in 2010, Stripe is arguably past prime time to go public. Why the delay?
It’s complicated.
With a valuation of $106.7 billion, the San Francisco and Dublin-headquartered company is one of the most successful payment startups of all time. Its seed round backers included Sequoia, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel – who all have records of making extraordinarily successful bets on nascent upstarts.
The company generated an estimated US$5.84 billion in revenue in 2025 and serves millions of businesses. It has expanded beyond payments to become a full-stack financial infrastructure platform. It has added services like subscription management, business setup, fraud prevention, lending and revenue/tax automation.
In 2024, Stripe reached profitability for the first time in a calendar year while total payment volume reached a massive US$1.4 trillion. In a Feb. 2025 news release, the company said that in each of the last six years, it had reinvested a higher proportion of its earnings in R&D “than any comparable company.” Cofounders Patrick and John Collison believe “this ability will prove particularly important in the coming years, as stablecoins, AI, and other forces reshape the landscape.”
Unsurprisingly, Stripe is leaning into its AI capabilities as it seeks to capitalize on the massive expectations that investors and large corporations have for the technology. The payments firm emphasizes that it has invested in AI models “that are delivering significant revenue and performance uplifts for its users.” The payments company says that Hertz increased authorization rates by 4% when it moved its payments to Stripe, while Forbes saw a 23% boost in revenue with the payments startup managing its subscription payments. Carsharing marketplace Turo captured $114 million in additional annual revenue with Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite.
While some startups would seek to use the momentum from AI-fueled growth to pave the way for an IPO, Stripe has shown no such inclination. Co-founders Patrick and John Collison have said that public companies are often suited for the “extract stage” rather than the “expand stage.” They say that staying private allows the company to focus on infrastructure building and long-term investments without the constant scrutiny and pressure to meet quarterly earnings per share (EPS) targets that come with being publicly traded.
At the same time, Stripe is profitable and cash-flow positive, so it does not need public market funding for capital. Unlike other fintech startups facing a financing squeeze, Stripe can finance its operations and acquisitions with existing cash and private funding rounds.
Stripe also regularly arranges tender offers and secondary sales, allowing early investors and employees to sell their shares and get liquidity without the need for a public listing. This reduces a key incentive for an immediate IPO.
Still, there are drawbacks to Stripe’s approach. On the one hand, tender offers and share buybacks may provide some liquidity to employees, this is a temporary fix and not a sustainable, long-term alternative to public market access.
Secondly, kicking the can down the road indefinitely could result in a lower valuation when the company does eventually go public. Stripe may be the highest-flying payments startup today, but that may not be the case in three or five years.
Industry segments Stripe is targeting like AI and stablecoins may cool off in the coming years as investors realize their limitations. And Stripe is far from the first big payments fintech to undergo an overnight conversion to stablecoin believer – Sweden’s Klarna recently announced it plans to issue KlarnaUSD.
While Stripe has hired major investment banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to advise on future listing options, no official IPO date has been set. Instead of a traditional IPO, a direct listing may be a more likely route if Stripe does choose to go public in the future, since the company has no pressing need to raise more capital.