Payments infrastructure giant Stripe announced Tuesday that it has inked deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $159 billion valuation.
Notably, the valuation represents an impressive 49% increase from the $106.7 billion Stripe was valued at in September, when it completed a separate tender offer. That deal marked the first time that Stripe had surpassed its previous peak $95 billion valuation that it achieved in March 2021.
Stripe declined to comment on the latest secondary sale beyond a written statement, in which it noted that the majority of funds for the tender offer are being provided by investors, including Thrive Capital, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz and others. Stripe said it will also use a portion of its own capital to repurchase shares, but did not specify how much.
The company, which counts the likes of ElevenLabs, Figma, Lovable, Shopify, Google and Amazon as customers, says that businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34% from 2024. Beyond payments, Stripe says its revenue products, including billing, invoicing and tax, are on track to collectively hit an annual run rate of $1 billion in 2026.
Tender offers have become more common as an increasing number of startups choose to stay private longer. Generative AI company Anthropic is also believed to be working on its own tender offer at a valuation of at least $350 billion.
Total global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $51.8 billion for 2025, per Crunchbase data. That’s a fairly significant — 27% — increase from 2024’s total of $40.8 billion raised.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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