Stripe announced a tender offer for employees and shareholders on Thursday that values the payments startup at $91.5 billion, the closest the company has been to its peak valuation of $95 billion in 2021.
“We very much care about providing good liquidity for employees and existing shareholders,” Stripe co-founder and President John Collison told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview on “Squawk Box.”
As for the company’s long-awaited public market debut, Collison said, “We are not dogmatic on the public vs. private question,” and “have no near-term IPO plans.”
Stripe also revealed in its annual letter on Thursday that it generated $1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38% from the year prior. The company said it was profitable in 2024, and expects to remain so this year.
Collison said the business can’t be managed on a “super tight quarterly EPS basis because this growth tends to come in waves.”
Stripe ranked third on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 List for 2024, jumping from the 28th position in 2023.
Collison said the artificial intelligence boom has been key to the company’s recent growth. High-profile AI startups OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Mistral are all Stripe clients.
“Unlike maybe previous booms that were more speculative in nature where you had asset price speculation, here we are seeing an AI boom that is very real,” Collison said. “There’s a bunch of companies that have grown and grown and grown over the past few years, but they’ve grown because they have real revenue and they have real revenue because they have customers that find their products really useful.”
More than 700 AI agent startups launched on Stripe last year, according to the company’s annual letter. Collison said a future where agents will make purchases for human customers is inevitable.
Founded in 2010, Stripe has regularly conducted tender offers to allow early investors and employees to sell a portion of their equity in order to reduce the pressure to go public. A year ago the company announced a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation.
