The valuation is a headline grabber: US$106.7 billion as of September 2025. It’s a number designed to signal a triumphant return, erasing the memory of the down-rounds and tech-winter anxieties that colored the past few years. Stripe, the private fintech behemoth founded by the Collison brothers, appears to be firing on all cylinders. The company is profitable, its payment volume is equivalent to a meaningful slice of global GDP, and it’s making aggressive moves into the two most hyped sectors in technology: cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.
On the surface, this is a simple story of a dominant company getting stronger. But I’ve learned that the simplest narratives are often the most misleading. The data points presented in 2025—the acquisitions, the product launches, the strategic partnerships—don’t just represent growth. They represent a calculated, almost clinical, repositioning. Stripe isn’t just riding the AI and crypto waves; it’s attempting to become the foundational infrastructure beneath them, rendering itself indispensable to the next iteration of the internet. The question isn't whether Stripe is growing. The question is whether this strategic pivot is a stroke of genius or a high-stakes gamble on two notoriously volatile frontiers.
The Crypto Reversal is Not What It Seems
Let’s first address the most dramatic plot twist: Stripe’s re-embrace of cryptocurrency. The company famously abandoned Bitcoin support back in 2018, citing scalability issues and a lack of real-world use for payments. It was a pragmatic decision, not an ideological one. Now, with the US$1.1 billion acquisition of stablecoin platform Bridge, Stripe is back in the game.
But this isn’t a nostalgic return. It’s a completely different play. They haven’t touched Bitcoin. Instead, they’ve zeroed in on stablecoins—digital assets pegged to fiat currencies like the US dollar. This is a critical distinction. Stripe isn’t betting on a speculative asset class; it’s leveraging a new technology for its original purpose: payments. When CEO Patrick Collison states that users have found stablecoins to be "easier, faster, better than the status quo," he’s not making a philosophical argument for decentralization. He’s making a utilitarian case for a new payment rail.
The launch of Stablecoin Financial Accounts across 101 countries and a new Visa card for spending those balances isn't about catering to crypto enthusiasts. It's about building a parallel financial system that bypasses the slower, more expensive parts of the traditional banking network. Think of it less as a crypto wallet and more as a global treasury management tool for the internet-native economy. It’s a plumbing upgrade. I’ve looked at hundreds of corporate strategy decks, and this is a classic infrastructure play disguised as a trendy tech adoption. The real question is one of motive: Is Stripe genuinely building a better financial future, or is it simply positioning itself to collect a toll on every transaction that flows through this new, highly efficient digital pipeline? Where does the public good end and the revenue model begin?
Building the AI Tollbooth
The second pillar of this strategy is artificial intelligence, and here, the execution is even more precise. Stripe’s approach is twofold: one defensive, one offensive.
The defensive move is internal. At its Sessions conference, the company unveiled a new AI foundation model trained on its own vast ocean of data—tens of billions of transactions. Its first application was to identify and block card testing attacks, a mundane but costly problem for merchants. The result was a 64% increase in detection rates. This isn’t a flashy consumer product; it's a quiet enhancement that deepens the moat around its core business. It makes Stripe stickier and more valuable to its massive enterprise clients like Nvidia, which just migrated its entire GeForce Now subscriber base to Stripe Billing in a mere six weeks.
The offensive move is what truly reveals the long-term ambition. The partnership with OpenAI to embed "Instant Checkout" within ChatGPT is a masterstroke. It’s a direct attempt to colonize the primary user interface of the emerging AI-driven internet. As users increasingly interact with AI agents to research, compare, and purchase goods and services, the point of transaction will shift away from traditional websites and apps. By embedding itself directly into the conversation, Stripe is ensuring it remains the default payment processor. It’s like building the cash register directly into the search engine.
This is the core of William Gaybrick's claim that "Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI." They aren't just serving AI companies (which they already do, counting 78% of the Forbes AI 50 as clients); they are weaving their payment APIs into the very fabric of how AI will conduct commerce. The co-development of the open-source "Agentic Commerce Protocol" is further evidence. They aren't waiting for a standard to emerge; they are creating it.
The Engine Room Beneath the Hype
For all the talk of crypto and AI, it’s easy to forget the sheer scale of the underlying business. The company processed US$1.4 trillion in 2024. To put that in perspective, that’s not just a big number; it’s equivalent to about 1.3% of global GDP. The "boring" enterprise services are what fund these ambitious forays. Stripe Billing, for example, surpassed a US$500 million annual revenue run rate—that single product line alone is a formidable fintech company.
This is the part of the analysis that often gets lost in the excitement of new technology. The company’s foundation isn't speculative; it's built on a massive, profitable, and deeply entrenched payment processing engine. The fact that businesses using Stripe are reportedly growing at seven times the rate of S&P 500 companies is a statistic that should give any competitor pause. It suggests a powerful flywheel effect: the best companies choose Stripe, and Stripe’s tools, in turn, help them grow faster.
The new product updates—support for 125 payment methods, consumer credit card issuing, the "Orchestration" tool to manage multiple processors—are all aimed at one thing: becoming the undeniable central nervous system for global commerce. Imagine the low, persistent hum of servers in a Dublin data center, processing that Nvidia migration. That's the sound of Stripe's real power. It’s not the sound of a keynote speech; it’s the sound of relentless, compounding operational dominance. The AI and stablecoin initiatives are not a desperate pivot; they are the next logical extensions of a company that has always sought to turn the complexity of global finance into a few simple lines of code.
The Valuation is in the Inevitability
My final analysis is this: The US$106.7 billion valuation isn't about hype. It's a calculated bet on Stripe's success in becoming a quasi-utility for the next technological era. The company isn't betting on whether stablecoins will replace fiat or if AI agents will become our primary shopping assistants. It's betting that whatever happens, a transaction will need to occur, and they will be the ones to process it. They are building the toll roads, the power lines, and the water mains for the next economy. The strategy is to become so deeply embedded in the infrastructure of both crypto-finance and AI-commerce that their use becomes an assumption, not a choice. The valuation reflects a belief not in a single product, but in a state of carefully engineered inevitability.
