Thrive Capital believed to be leading new multibillion-dollar investment in Stripe

Mary Ann Azevedo@bayareawriter / 12:26 PM ESTJanuary 31, 2023

Image Credits: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Thrive Capital has reportedly committed $1 billion in fresh capital to payments giant Stripe as part of a new investment in the works that would value the fintech company at between $55 billion and $60 billion.

TechCrunch reported last week that Stripe was seeking to raise $2 billion but the number could actually be closer to $2.5 billion to $3 billion, according to reports from The New York Times and The Information. In an unusual twist, Stripe is believed to be raising new funds to, as The Information reported, "address the issue of expiring restricted stock units for some of its veteran employees—and a massive employee tax bill that will likely come with it."

Neither Stripe nor Thrive Capital commented on the rumors when contacted by TechCrunch.

Thrive Capital is believed to be leading the new investment in Stripe. The New York-based firm, started by Joshua Kushner, also led the company’s $70 million Series C in 2014 when it was valued at $3.5 billion.

By 2021, Stripe would go on to achieve the highest-ever valuation for a private company when it raised $600 million at a $95 billion valuation. But Stripe has not been immune to the global downturn: In November, it laid off 14% of its staff, or around 1,120 people. And the company has slashed its internal valuation more than once over the past year. Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that Stripe had cut its internal valuation to $63 billion. That 11% cut came after a prior internal valuation cut that valued the company at $74 billion.

Last week, Stripe apparently told employees that it had set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing, or by pursuing a transaction on the private market, such as a fundraising event and a tender offer. But most industry observers believe that a fundraise scenario is a far more likely one for the company.

Fintech analyst Alex Johnson told TechCrunch that Stripe may be pushing for an exit because it’s potentially "been hanging on to some really talented early employees by promising them a big ‘exit’ on their equity."

He added: "My guess is that the market for Stripe secondaries has gone down quite a bit over the last year and those employees are feeling frustrated and putting pressure on Stripe’s management to make good."

What’s Stripe’s deal?

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. … Continue reading What’s Stripe’s deal?

Copy and paste this URL into your WordPress site to embed

The decline in e-commerce as the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic eased most certainly led to less revenue for Stripe. Stripe reportedly notched gross revenues of $12 billion and was EBITDA profitable in 2021, according to Forbes. The company’s products, in its own words, "power payments for online and in-person retailers, subscriptions businesses, software platforms and marketplaces, and everything in between."

In 2022, according to The Information, Stripe’s gross revenues totaled $14.2 billion.

The company has reportedly struggled in recent years in the face of increased competition. The Information also reported that Stripe has seen a number of initiatives not come to fruition as hoped. For example, according to that publication, the company last fall "scuttled a crucial project called Sonic, which was supposed to rewrite significant pieces of Stripe’s code in part to speed up transactions—an important step to reduce cloud computing costs and boost profit margins before a blockbuster public listing."

Indeed, as a business that has traditionally derived revenue from variable transaction volume, Stripe appears to be exploring ways to generate meaningful — and predictable — revenue. For example, Amazon announced on January 23 that it plans to "significantly expand" its use of Stripe. Reported Pymnts: "Under the new agreement, Stripe will become a strategic payments partner for Amazon in the U.S., Europe and Canada, processing a significant portion of Amazon’s total payments volume. Stripe will be used across Amazon’s business units, including Prime, Audible, Kindle, Amazon Pay, Buy With Prime and more." Also, TechCrunch recently reported on how new fintech startup Mayfair is paying Stripe a fee as part of its mission to offer businesses a higher yield on their cash.

Founded by Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison (the CEO), Stripe has raised more than $2.2 billion in funding since its 2010 inception from investors such as Allianz (via its Allianz X fund), Axa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Base Partners, GV and an investor from the founders’ home country, Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA).

Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up here.

Got a news tip or inside information about a topic we covered? We’d love to hear from you. You can reach me via Signal at 408.404.3036. Or you can drop us a note at [email protected]. Happy to respect anonymity requests.

Please login to comment

Login / Create Account
Daily
Week in Review
Startups Weekly
Event Updates
Advertising Updates
TechCrunch+ Announcements
TechCrunch+ Events
TechCrunch+ Roundup
Email*
Thrive Capital has reportedly committed $1 billion in fresh capital to payments giant Stripe as part of a new investment in the works that would value the fintech company at between $55 billion and...
Wonder Brands has since launched over 15 brands in the past 12 months and over 2,000 SKUs in the categories of home and garden, sports and fitness and beauty and personal care categories.
In 2021, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a comprehensive modernization strategy he dubbed IDM (integrated device manufacturing) 2.0. As part of that vision, the company announced a $20 billion in...
X owner Elon Musk is promising to "soon" address the lack of transparency around "shadowbanning" on the social network formerly known as Twitter — that is, not outrigh...
Appreciation isn’t just about gifts or praise. It’s about taking the employee — their experiences and interests — into consideration.
Bringing bitcoin to the TradFi market in a manner that is already well-understood could unlock lots of demand for the cryptocurrency in the near-term.
ProjectDiscovery, a platform that detects new, exploitable vulnerabilities in codebases, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by CRV with participation from Po...
‘There would be all this pressure to go public, but then there wouldn’t be an appetite for it. And so [it would] be harder to get out.’
Featured Article

How to submit a guest column to TechCrunch

To level the playing field for people who want to share tech-related knowledge and opinions, Tech...
Walter Thompson
11:13 AM EDTAugust 17, 2023
Google is launching a new Transparency Center to make it easier for users to learn more about its product policies. The central hub collects existing resources and policies to inform users on how G...
Agility Robotics is on a steady march toward commercialization, thanks to the continued growth of robotics in warehouse fulfillment and logistics and the expanding feature set of its bipedal robot....
WhatsApp is getting an upgrade that will allow users to share HD photos through the messaging app, according to an announcement shared by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his Instagram broadcast channel...
TechCrunch
Fundraising

Most VCs have no clue what a CTO does

Listing someone as a technical co-founder with 30-50% ownership stake in the company is not a goo...
Haje Jan Kamps
10:30 AM EDTAugust 17, 2023
Arthur, a machine learning monitoring startup, has benefited from the interest in generative AI this year, and it has been developing tools to help companies work with LLMs more effectively. Today ...
Agriculture could store 2 billion to 4 billion metric tons of CO2 annually, but first we have to know which farms have the most potential.
Hackers are exploiting a newly discovered vulnerability in yet another enterprise file transfer software, the U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency has warned. CISA on Wednesday added a vulnerabil...
Featured Article

Acronym’s new computer with Asus is bonkers, but that’s the point

How do you critique functional art? Do you base your assessment on its capability or the resoluti...
Matthew Panzarino
8:41 PM EDTAugust 16, 2023
Uruguayan fintech company dLocal saw its stock surge by over 30% on Wednesday on the news that the payments outfit had tapped former Mercado Libre CFO Pedro Arnt as its new co-CEO. Shares closed up...
As the buy now, pay later (BNPL) market continues on its slow decline, one of the major players, Splitit, is embarking on an effort to reorganize and pivot. Splitit today announced that it has a $6...
You’ve surely seen all of those videos of robots opening and walking through doors. The dirty little secret is that most or all of them involved a good bit of human hand holding. That can come in t...
Vietnamese EV maker VinFast’s debut Tuesday on the Nasdaq public exchange was nothing short of remarkable. The automaker, which went public via a merger with special purpose acquisition compa...