Stripe’s rating rises to $91.5 billion in secondary list deals

Stripe announced on Thursday it is closest to its $95 billion peak rating in 2021, as employees and shareholders value the $91.5 billion payment startup.

“We are very interested in providing good liquidity to our employees and our existing shareholders,” Stripe co-founder President John Collison told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview with “Squawk Box.”

Regarding the company’s long-awaited public market debut, Collison said, “We are not dogmatic about public and private questions” and “we have no IPO plans near.”

Stripe also revealed in its annual letter on Thursday that its total payments in 2024 were $1.4 trillion, an increase of 38% from the previous year. The company said it was profitable in 2024 and hopes to do so this year.

Collison said that this growth tends to be a wave and that it “can’t manage it on an ultra-tight quarterly EPS basis.”

Stripe ranked third on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list in 2024, jumping from the 28th position in 2023.

Collison said the artificial intelligence boom is key to the company’s recent growth. Famous AI startup Openai, humanity, confusion, Mistral are all stripe clients.

“Unlike the previous boom that was more speculative in nature when there was asset price speculation, we see a very realistic AI boom here,” Collison said. “There are many companies that have grown, grown, grown and grown over the past few years, but they are growing because they are getting real revenue and have real revenue because they have customers who find their products really useful.”

According to the company’s annual letter, more than 700 AI agent startups were launched on Stripe last year. Collison said the future in which agents buy for human customers is inevitable.

Founded in 2010, Stripe regularly makes public offers to help early investors and employees sell a portion of their capital to ease public pressure. A year ago, the company announced a tender offer at a valuation of $65 billion.