In their annual letter, Patrick and John Collison said businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9trn in total volume in 2025, up 34pc on 2024.
The annual Stripe letter published today – signed by its founders, Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison – which coincides with news that Stripe has hit a $159bn valuation with its latest employee tender offer. This is up from a $106bn valuation a year ago, but the founders still appear not to be heading for a public offering.
Stripe said it had signed agreements with investors “to provide liquidity to current and former Stripe employees through a tender offer at a $159bn valuation”, with the majority of funds for the tender offer are being provided by investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue, A16z and others. Stripe said it will also use a portion of its own capital to repurchase shares.
Stripe remained “robustly profitable”, the Collisons’ letter stated, allowing it to continue investing heavily in product development, with more than 350 product updates last year, as well as acquisitions that included programmable wallet company Privy, stablecoin orchestration platform Bridge and Metronome, which “powers the intricate usage-based billing models used by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Confluent and Nvidia”.
While much of the letter covered recent developments in AI – the brothers believe we are still at the relatively early stages of agentic AI in commerce – they also write at length about the stablecoin payment market which they say doubled to $400bn in 2025.
In September, Stripe teamed up with venture capital firm Paradigm to announce their joint venture Tempo, a blockchain built around stablecoins. Tempo is being jointly incubated by the two companies and is led by Matt Huang, Paradigm’s co-founder and managing partner.
“Tempo is purpose-built for stablecoins and real-world payments, born from Stripe’s experience in global payments and Paradigm’s expertise in crypto tech,” Huang said in a blogpost at the time, adding that Tempo will complement existing crypto infrastructure and offer a way for large enterprises to come on chain, increasing the adoption of crypto tools and infrastructure.
“With Tempo, businesses get dedicated payment lanes, sub-second finality, opt-in privacy, and interoperability with compliance and accounting systems,” the Collisons wrote today. “These features may sound prosaic, but they matter a great deal for infrastructure that supports real-world economic activity. Companies like Visa, Nubank, and Shopify are already testing Tempo for a number of use cases, including global payouts, embedded finance and remittances.”
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