Stripe's Payment Volume Hits $1.9T
Stripe's payment volume surged 34% in 2025 to $1.9 trillion, as the company increasingly targets the "AI-enabled commerce" future. The fintech giant's infrastructure handled a record 465 million transactions over Black Friday/Cyber Monday alone, underscoring its scale as it positions itself to support AI-native merchant workflows.
A recent tender offer in February 2026 valued Stripe at $159 billion, a 74% increase from its $91.5 billion valuation just a year prior. The share sale, providing liquidity to employees, was backed by investors like Thrive Capital, Coatue, and Andreessen Horowitz, underscoring private market confidence as the company remains unprofitable. Stripe was founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, who serve as CEO and President, respectively. Before starting Stripe, the duo, who briefly attended MIT and Harvard, had already sold their first company, Auctomatic, for $5 million while they were teenagers. While PayPal remains the global market share leader in online payment processing at 43.4%, Stripe holds a strong second position with approximately 21-29% of the market. Stripe's key competitors also include Adyen, which targets large enterprises, and Square, which has a strong foothold in integrated in-person and online sales. The company's focus on "AI-enabled commerce" involves a deep partnership with OpenAI. Together, they are developing the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open-source framework designed to create a standard language for AI agents to execute purchases on behalf of users. To facilitate this new form of commerce, Stripe launched the Agentic Commerce Suite, a low-code solution for businesses to integrate once and sell across multiple AI agents. This infrastructure powers features like "Instant Checkout," allowing ChatGPT users to buy products from merchants like Etsy and Shopify directly within the chat interface. Beyond its core payment processing, Stripe's suite of revenue products—including Billing, Invoicing, and Tax services—is on track to generate $1 billion in annual revenue in 2026. Its business lending arm, Stripe Capital, also expanded, with funding volume growing by 45% year-over-year.
