Stripe Confident in Web Economy Despite ‘Significant’ Slowing

Stripe’s businesses processed more than $817 billion in 2022, the payments company said Wednesday (April 5).

In the company’s annual user letter, co-founders and brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison noted that this figure was up 26% from the previous year.

“This is a significant deceleration from the breakneck growth that we saw during 2020 and 2021,” the Collisons wrote. “At the same time, we are as confident as ever in the internet economy’s long-term prospects, and we’re heartened by the steady advancement of the millions of businesses we serve in the face of banking crises, war, pestilence, energy shocks, supply chain issues, inflation and broader volatility.”

The letter noted that more than 100 companies handle more than $1 billion in payments with Stripe each year, with this set expanding by over 50% annually since 2018.

Last year also saw the number of new businesses using Stripe rise by 19%. America remains the company’s largest market, although 55% of the businesses that joined Stripe last year came from outside the U.S.

The letter came a few weeks after reports that Stripe had raised $6.5 billion in a funding round that valued the payments firm at $50 billion. That valuation was down from the $95 billion valuation Stripe reached in 2021.

“The funds raised will be used to provide liquidity to current and former employees and address employee withholding tax obligations related to equity awards, resulting in the retirement of Stripe shares that will offset the issuance of new shares to Series I investors,” the company said at the time. “Stripe does not need this capital to run its business.”

Earlier in March, there were reports that Stripe’s funding round was being driven by a $3.5 billion tax bill. Stripe slashed has its internal valuation three times since 2022. This lower price is different from the valuation determined by investors.

Stripe’s letter also discussed the company’s partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI and the broader artificial intelligence (AI) revolution.

“This wave of innovation is happening on Stripe,” the letter said. “We ran the numbers, and a sizable majority of the AI startups listed in one of the most extensive we could find use Stripe.”

PYMNTS spoke with Emily Glassberg Sands, Stripe’s head of information and data science, about the partnership last month.

“We’re powering [OpenAI’s] monetization strategy, and [OpenAI is helping] Stripe evolve from our first act as a pure-payments focus to becoming a financial one-stop-shop [for the digital economy],” Sands said.