Stripe reports first profitable year amid valuation bounce
Stripe has published its annual letter, providing a limited view of its finances alongside a broader sense of the company’s strategy and ongoing priorities. And this year there are some of the strongest signs yet that the company is nearing an IPO.
Stripe reported a 38% increase in total payment volume to $1.4tn in 2024, having passed the $1tn mark for the first time in 2023. However, it has also moved from being “robustly cashflow positive”, as it put it in its letter a year ago, to fully profitable in 2024 – a state of affairs that it expects to continue into 2025.
The company partly attributes its strong growth this year to investments in artificial intelligence and related technologies, citing AI optimisation-driven improvements both to its own revenue and to that of key customers, including Hertz and Forbes. It also highlighted key AI players among its clients – including OpenAI, Anthropic and Midjourney – and said that it is developing tools for AI-driven commerce, including optimising for transactions conducted by AI agents.
Stripe also provided an update on Bridge, the stablecoin orchestration player it acquired at the end of 2024, and how it viewed the potential of stablecoins as an area of focus. Drawing comparisons with both petrodollars and eurodollars, Stripe sees stablecoins as making money movement cheaper and faster, while being programmable, and plans for its platform to be “the best way to build with stablecoins”.
In particular, Stripe highlighted how companies were using stablecoins for treasury management and to conduct cross-border payments, citing client examples including SpaceX’s use of Bridge to repatriate funds from Starlink sales in Argentina and Nigeria.
Having traditionally tied its financial success to the internet economy as a whole, Stripe also highlighted its broad customer base, which includes half of the Fortune 500 and widely used SaaS platforms, as well as long-established companies using its tools to modernise. It also drew attention to lagging European productivity and its impact on startup growth, leveraging its own position as a company co-headquartered in Ireland to call for large-scale capital market and regulatory simplification on the continent.
For Stripe itself, however, its US headquarters may soon prove more significant to its future, as shortly after releasing the annual letter the company also announced a tender offer for employees and shareholders that values it at $91.5bn. The move, which sees the company repurchasing shares, means that Stripe is now the closest it has been to its 2021 valuation peak of $91bn, after dropping to $50bn in 2023.
This increases the chance of the company initiating its long-anticipated IPO in the next year or so, and with this year’s letter published earlier than in previous years, it may already be laying significant groundwork.
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