Stripe
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Stripe, Inc. is a financial infrastructure company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, and Dublin, Ireland, that has become a foundational payments layer for the AI economy. Founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, it sells payment processing, billing, and money-movement services through developer-facing APIs.[1] Although Stripe is not an AI lab, it processes payments for nearly all of the leading AI firms, codeveloped the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI, trained what it describes as the first foundation model for payments, and is building settlement rails designed for AI agents as economic actors. A February 2026 tender offer valued the still-private company at $159 billion, up 74% year over year and its highest valuation to date.[2]
Stripe's core business is accepting and routing online payments for businesses, alongside a growing suite that includes subscription billing, invoicing, tax compliance, fraud prevention (Radar), corporate card issuing, in-person payments, and banking-as-a-service tools. Businesses on Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025, up 34% year over year and equal to roughly 1.6% of global GDP.[3][4] The company says it serves more than five million businesses directly or through platforms, including all of the top AI companies, 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and 80% of the Nasdaq 100.[4]
Patrick Collison is CEO and John Collison is president. Stripe remains privately held; rather than going public, it has repeatedly run tender offers that let employees and early shareholders sell stock to investors such as Thrive Capital, Coatue, and Andreessen Horowitz. As of June 2026 it has announced no IPO plans.[2]
The Collison brothers began prototyping a payments API, initially called /dev/payments, in 2009 and 2010 while studying at MIT (Patrick) and Harvard (John). The company received early backing from Y Combinator in 2010 and a $2 million seed investment in 2011 from Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, then launched publicly in the United States in September 2011.[5] Its pitch, reducing online payment acceptance to a few lines of code, made it the default choice for startups and later for large enterprises and platforms such as Amazon, Shopify, and Instacart.
Stripe's valuation has swung sharply with the broader technology cycle before being lifted by the AI boom:
| Date | Valuation | Event |
|---|---|---|
| March 2021 | $95 billion | Series H fundraise, then the highest ever for a US private startup [2] |
| March 2023 | $50 billion | $6.5 billion Series I raise during the fintech downturn [2] |
| February 2024 | $65 billion | Employee tender offer [2] |
| February 2025 | $91.5 billion | Tender offer alongside the 2024 annual letter [2] |
| February 2026 | $159 billion | Tender offer; up 74% year over year, funded largely by Thrive Capital, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, and Stripe itself [2][3] |
The 2026 valuation surpassed the 2021 peak and made Stripe one of the world's most valuable private companies, a recovery the Collisons attributed in large part to the growth of AI businesses transacting on the platform.[2][4]
Stripe's relationship with the AI sector predates the agent era. In March 2023, OpenAI selected Stripe to monetize ChatGPT and DALL-E: Stripe Billing and Checkout powered ChatGPT Plus subscriptions, Radar screened fraud, and Link handled consumer checkout. The partnership ran both ways; Stripe joined the GPT-4 beta in January 2023 and embedded the model into products such as natural-language search in its developer documentation.[6]
By early 2025 Stripe was the financial platform for 78% of the Forbes AI 50, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Midjourney, and Cohere, and credited "long-standing investments in AI" for its $1.4 trillion of 2024 volume, up 38%.[7] Its transaction data has become a widely cited index of AI monetization: the top 100 AI companies on Stripe reached $1 million in annualized revenue in a median of 11.5 months, about four months faster than the quickest SaaS cohort of the 2010s, with ElevenLabs, Cursor, and Bolt among the highlighted examples.[8][9] Patrick Collison has argued that dismissing such startups as model "wrappers" misses the point, comparing them to early e-commerce companies that were more than "credit card wrappers."[8]
The company also courts AI infrastructure providers. At its Sessions 2025 conference, Stripe announced a deeper partnership with Nvidia, which had migrated its entire GeForce NOW subscriber base to Stripe Billing in six weeks, the fastest such migration to date.[10] Usage-based and token-based billing for AI products has become a major growth driver; Stripe's Revenue suite (Billing, Invoicing, Tax) was on track for a $1 billion annual run rate in 2026.[3]
On September 29, 2025, OpenAI and Stripe launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, letting US users buy from Etsy sellers, with more than a million Shopify merchants such as Glossier, SKIMS, Vuori, and Spanx to follow. Purchases happen inside the chat, initially for single items.[14][15] Underpinning it is the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open standard codeveloped by OpenAI and Stripe that specifies how AI agents, buyers, and merchants exchange order and payment information while merchants remain the merchants of record, retaining control over pricing, customer relationships, returns, and fulfillment. The specification is published under an Apache 2.0 license and is maintained by OpenAI and Stripe.[16]
For payments, Stripe introduced a Shared Payment Token API, which passes a buyer's credentials to a merchant in a scoped, single-use form; merchants on other processors can participate through the protocol's Delegated Payments specification, and Stripe merchants can enable agentic payments with as little as one line of code.[14]
Stripe had been experimenting with agentic AI plumbing for some time. In November 2024 it released an agent toolkit, an SDK that lets agents built with frameworks such as LangChain, CrewAI, and the Vercel AI SDK call Stripe APIs, meter token usage for billing, and pay for goods using single-use virtual cards issued with spending limits through Stripe Issuing.[13]
In December 2025 the company packaged its agent-facing capabilities into the Agentic Commerce Suite, a low-code product that lets a business sell across AI surfaces with one integration. Early adopters included Coach, Kate Spade, URBN, Revolve, and Ashley Furniture, plus ecommerce platforms such as Squarespace, Wix, Etsy, WooCommerce, commercetools, and BigCommerce.[17]
At Sessions 2026, held in San Francisco on April 29, 2026, Stripe made AI the organizing theme of 288 product launches, billed as "economic infrastructure for AI." The Agentic Commerce Suite gained distribution partnerships with Google, connecting merchants to shopping in Google's AI Mode and the Gemini app via Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, and with Meta, joining existing integrations with OpenAI and Microsoft surfaces.[18][19] Stripe also opened Link, its 250-million-user consumer wallet, to AI agents, which transact using disposable virtual cards so that real credentials are never exposed; upgraded Radar to fight AI-era abuse such as free-trial farming and stolen API tokens (blocking over 3.3 million risky registrations in a single month across high-growth AI companies); and added AI-native pricing primitives such as dimensional pricing and streaming payments. Patrick Collison framed the stakes: "AI is the largest platform shift for the economy since the internet began."[18]
Stripe has used machine learning in production since launching Radar, its fraud-detection system, in October 2016; Radar scores every payment using signals drawn from across the Stripe network.[12] In May 2025 the company unveiled a payments foundation model, a self-supervised network trained on tens of billions of transactions that produces general-purpose embeddings of each payment, treating each charge as a token and sequences of behavior as context, rather than relying on hand-engineered features.[10] According to Stripe executives Emily Glassberg Sands and Will Gaybrick, the generalized model outperforms the dozens of specialized models it replaces and adapts faster to new fraud patterns. "We have found over and over and over again in machine learning, generalized models outperform," Gaybrick said, adding that the approach "performs better and adapts better to changes in fraud patterns."[10]
Applied to card-testing attacks, the foundation model raised detection rates for large businesses by 64% "practically overnight," according to Stripe; its earlier specialized models had taken about two years to cut such attacks by 80%.[10] Stripe says the model now identifies over 95% of card-testing attacks on large users in real time, up from roughly 59% under prior methods, an order-of-magnitude reduction in attacks that slip through.[10][11] Card testing is fraud in which an attacker runs many small charges to check whether stolen card numbers are valid before using them for larger purchases.
Stripe's money-rail strategy increasingly targets machine-to-machine payments. In February 2025 it closed its largest acquisition, paying $1.1 billion for Bridge, a stablecoin orchestration API founded by Zach Abrams and Sean Yu.[20] At Sessions 2025 it launched Stablecoin Financial Accounts in 101 countries, letting businesses hold and send USDC and USDB balances alongside fiat rails.[11] In June 2025 it agreed to acquire Privy, a wallet-infrastructure startup powering more than 75 million accounts.[21]
In September 2025, Stripe and the crypto investment firm Paradigm unveiled Tempo, a payments-focused layer-1 blockchain incubated by the two companies and led by Paradigm cofounder Matt Huang. Its design partners notably include OpenAI and Anthropic, alongside Visa, Mastercard, Deutsche Bank, Shopify, and DoorDash, reflecting expectations that AI agents will need fast, programmable settlement.[22] Tempo raised a $500 million Series A at a $5 billion valuation in October 2025, led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital.[23] In March 2026 Tempo launched its mainnet together with the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard co-authored with Stripe that lets autonomous agents send and receive money in both fiat and stablecoins, including microtransactions and recurring payments; MPP was folded into Stripe's agentic commerce stack at Sessions 2026.[24][18] Stripe's 2025 annual letter reported that stablecoin payment volumes roughly doubled in 2025 to around $400 billion, about 60% of it business-to-business, with volume on Bridge more than quadrupling.[4]
Stripe occupies an unusual position in the AI buildout: it neither trains frontier models nor sells compute, yet it sits in the revenue path of most companies that do, giving it both a financial stake in AI monetization and a privileged dataset for measuring it. Its annual letters have become a standard reference for claims about how fast AI startups monetize relative to the SaaS era.[8][4] In agentic commerce, Stripe has positioned itself as the neutral payments layer across competing ecosystems, simultaneously maintaining ACP with OpenAI, integrating with Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, and supplying checkout for Meta and Microsoft surfaces, while card networks and rivals push their own agent-payment frameworks.[18][19] Whether AI agents become routine economic actors remains an open question, but Stripe has made itself the most prominent bet that they will, and its 74% valuation jump to $159 billion in February 2026 suggests investors agree.[2]