Stripe: Thiel and Musk Seed Money, a Layoff Duck Email and a PayPal Bid

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Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe in Palo Alto in 2010, when accepting payments online meant weeks of merchant accounts, payment gateways and card security work. Stripe let developers take payments by adding a few lines of code, selling to engineers instead of chief financial officers. In 2011 it raised $2 million from backers including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It then added Atlas for Delaware incorporation in 2016, Issuing for company cards in 2018 and Capital for automated cash advances in 2019, along with in-person card readers, Tax, Identity and Link, which passed 200 million users by September 2025.

In July 2022 Stripe cut its internal valuation from $95 billion to $74 billion and later laid off 14% of its staff, and in January 2025 it let go nearly 300 more workers. In March 2026 the FTC warned Stripe and other processors about debanking people over political or religious activities. A February 2026 tender offer valued Stripe at $159 billion after it processed $1.9 trillion for five million businesses in 2025. It bought stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1 billion, wallet company Privy and AI billing platform Metronome, finalized a $7.5 billion purchase of OpenRouter in August 2026, and in July 2026 joined Advent International in a $53 billion bid for PayPal.

• Stripe Capital reads real-time sales data with machine learning and collects repayment as a share of future daily sales.
• Stripe Climate grew into Frontier, a $925 million advance market commitment for carbon dioxide removal.
• An automated offboarding glitch sent laid-off employees an email with a cartoon duck, and the chief people officer apologized.
• The Bridge, Privy and Metronome deals target instant stablecoin microtransactions and usage billing for AI agents.
• Stripe runs dual headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin.