Fintech Checkout.com announced Friday it reached a $12 billion valuation as part of its employee stock buyback program.
On the one hand, there are few startups that can achieve big cone status, so $12 billion won’t sneeze. It’s a valuable company worthy enough to land founder and CEO Guillaume Pousaz on Forbes’ billionaires list.
Meanwhile, it was a short time when Checkout.com was valued at a whopping $40 billion in 2022, as part of the $1 billion Series D round was closed. By the end of the year, Venture World had already hit the bare market and had already cut its valuation to $11 billion. And it again dropped its valuation, downgrading it to $9.35 billion in 2023, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Therefore, $12 billion represents an almost 30% increase from the previous valuation.
However, this rating is not available as investors are dropping cash. The company is one of the only people who support the employee’s stock, and no other investors are involved in the tender offer, a spokesman told us. Instead, the rating comes from a 409A rating, the person said. It is an independent third party evaluation. It’s not the same as a vote of trust from professional investors, but it’s not just that the company is giving itself.
To be fair, Checkout.com’s Archrival Stripe has done its own valuation suppression at the same venture capital bear market, crashing from a bubble height of $95 billion in 2021 to $50 billion during the slump in 2023. But Stripe had outside investors who helped to cherish it. And it is rumored that Stripe is working on yet another tender offer at a valuation of $106.7 billion, Axios reported.
But just because Checkout.com competes with one of the most highly regarded startups of all time, it doesn’t minimize the outcomes of its own business.
London-based Payments Company, popular among large e-commerce sites like eBay and Pinterest, said it was beginning to be profitable by the end of 2024 and was on track to make its full year-round profitability in 2025. Checkout.com says it processes around $1 billion worth of e-commerce payments a day and employs 19 employees this year.
Checkout.com also informs TechCrunch that employees with tenure for at least a year or more will be eligible for the buyback program, but refused to show the size of the buyback in either total spending or number of shares.
Note: This story has been updated with more information about previous reviews.
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