Yahoo Finance Stripe ‘Happy’ to Stay Private After Reaching $95 Billion Value
(Bloomberg) -- Stripe Inc.’s president said the digital payments company that was last valued at $95 billion has no “immediate” plans to go public.
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“We’re very happy as a private company,” John Collison, who founded the company with his brother, said at a conference in Abu Dhabi. “I think for us part of that and part of our patience stems from the fact that it feels like we’re very early in Stripe’s journey.”
Stripe, which has headquarters in Dublin and San Francisco, raised $600 million in March, becoming the most valuable U.S. startup and one of the biggest globally alongside TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd, according to data provider CB Insights. Bloomberg News reported in September that it was in early discussions with investment banks about going public as soon as next year through a direct listing or initial public offering.
A plunge by India’s Paytm after its IPO has meanwhile cast a shadow over the prospects of technology firms preparing to go public. While its shares rebounded on Tuesday, retail investors -- who bought an unprecedented amount of shares in Paytm’s parent One 97 Communications Ltd. -- saw more than 30% of their value wiped out since the payment firm’s listing on Thursday.
Stripe competes with Square Inc. and Paypal Holdings Inc. Its products are used by businesses including Amazon.com Inc., Salesforce.com Inc. and Lyft Inc.
The 11-year-old company made its first foray into the Middle East earlier in 2021 by opening an office in Dubai. Speaking on Tuesday in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Collison said Stripe is looking to grow “more broadly” across the Gulf region to make its services available for companies like U.K. food-delivery startup Deliveroo Plc that are embarking on expansion plans of their own.
“This is a massive region that is just starting to inflect in terms of its own growth,” he said. “We just arrived here in June. So it feels like we’re early on that journey, we’re still very heavily investing.”
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