Irish led payment processing firm Stripe is considering an acquisition of all or parts of PayPal, according to people familiar with the matter.
Stripe, which is privately held and is among the industry’s most valuable companies, has expressed preliminary interest in a potential acquisition of the digital payments pioneer or its assets, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private.
The deliberations are early and there’s no certainty they’ll lead to a transaction, the people said. Representatives for Stripe and PayPal declined to comment.
PayPal rose 2.5 per cent in New York on Wednesday a day after a 6.7 per cent gain. That gives it a market value of more than $43 billion (€36.5 billion).
Founded in the late 1990s, PayPal was an early mover in digital payments. It has since struggled with modernising its payment technologies as rivals such as Apple and Alphabet’s Google have seized market share.
Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, has become one of the industry’s most coveted players.
“PayPal has had, obviously, a tough time over the past few years and the landscape has changed quite a bit with Apple Pay and Google Pay and everything like that,” Collison, Stripe’s president, said in an interview this week. “I can’t talk about any, you know, M&A hypotheticals but they’ve definitely had a tough time.”
PayPal’s former board chair, Enrique Lores, is due to take up his new role as president and chief executive officer on March 1, replacing Alex Chriss, who was ousted as CEO this month. David Dorman was appointed to replace Lores as board chair.
Chriss’s taking of the reins from Dan Schulman in 2023 had been seen at the time as a much-needed shift. How consumers and businesses handle payments had changed enormously since PayPal was conceived.
The company’s fourth-quarter profit and revenue missed analysts’ estimates, according to results for the period that also showed a continued slowdown in payment volume.
Stripe’s interest in PayPal comes a day after it said it has been valued at more than $159 billion (€135 billion) following a tender offer that allowed employees to sell shares without going public.
The company said it had signed agreements with investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue, a16z and others to provide the majority of the capital for the tender offer, but it would also use some of its own money to repurchase shares.
Stripe’s valuation has climbed in the past year, jumping from the $107 billion it was valued at in September last year.
In a regular update letter, the company said revenue generated by businesses on its platform rose more than a third last year, reaching $1.9 trillion. That is equivalent to roughly 1.6 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP).
“All in all, 2025 was a strong year for the internet economy, and we’re delighted to see so many of Stripe’s customers do so well,” the company said in the update. – Additional reporting by Bloomberg
